Our soon to be released hosted website platform IO is a native cloud application. Designed not just for hosting websites in the cloud, but for hosting cloud-based websites. It may sound like splitting a hair, but the differences are profound.
Many of today's cloud/SaaS applications are nothing more than traditional web applications that are hosted in the cloud. If you were to look under the hood you'd see that they are employing a technology architecture that goes back to the 1990's complete with an relational database such as MySQL, Oracle, or SQL Server. There's nothing wrong with those technologies per se and for certain types of applications, they are still the best choice. However if you are looking to build a modern web site that is highly redundant, fast, scalable, and mobile ready and you don't want to spend a fortune on monthly hosting then you need to leverage a native cloud content management system.
Trying to figure out how to spot a cloud based content management system? Here are five questions to ask:
1. Will my website automatically scale to handle more traffic and data? Without hours, days, or weeks of prep time and without having to commit to a larger long-term contract or fee. Cloud applications are Elastic!
2. Is my website geographically redundant? In other words, if a single datacenter (not server but the entire datacenter) fails is there another active version of the site operational in a different data center and geographical location? Cloud applications are geographically redundant!
3. Is my website blazingly fast? Native cloud website take advantage of drastically lower storage costs than are possible in previous hosting models. As a result, developers can now optimize sites for Reads rather than Writes. The FB/Twitter mailbox story. Cloud applications are fast!
4. Am I paying the same or more for hosting that I did 15 years ago? Am I paying for peak load? These days you should only be paying for what you use, shouldn't have a long term contract, and should be paying less than you did 10-15 years ago. Cloud applications are a great value!
5. Are platform improvements and upgrades automatically available in my site? Cloud applications are maintenance free!