03 Sep How cloud computing can help small businesses
Outsourcing computer applications to providers over the Web gives you flexibility and saves money, too
For Det Ansinn, server capacity is critical. His 10-person software company, BrickSimple, in Dublin, Pa., develops applications for mobile phones. In December the company released an application called Xbox Live Friends that lets people use their phones to play Xbox games with each other and shows which other players are online. Nearly 2 million people have downloaded the app, with half signing up in the first month. Requests to log in and play on BrickSimple’s applications have jumped to nearly 3 million on any given day, compared with the few hundred thousand the company had a year ago.
That certainly sounds like good news, but, Ansinn says, “We hit a wall.” His $5 million company was using an off-site facility to host the application, and as more people logged on to play, the server system slowed to a crawl. Yet when usage was light, Ansinn was stuck paying $100 a day for capacity he didn’t need. “We built all this success and reached this turning point, but we couldn’t afford to spend more money every month to support this,” he says. In April the company decided to host Xbox Live Friends on Google’s App Engine, largely solving its capacity problems. Gamers download the app directly from iTunes, then connect through Google to play. BrickSimple pays just $15 a day, on average, to use App Engine.
Read full article>>