Netphase Has Its Head In The Clouds

Ever since the beta period for Amazon’s Enhanced Computing Cloud, or EC2, Netphase has been deploying applications into the stratosphere. We immediately saw the benefits of having a robust, infinitely scalable, stable and ultimately flexible environment in which to host everything from a simple content managed site up to the most demanding search engine application. We are proud to say that today, all Netphase hosted applications are deployed on our EC2 infrastructure.

We find that the ability to spin-up a new instance of a server in minutes and then take it down whenever it is no longer needed makes EC2 a perfect environment for establishing test servers and also for adding additional application servers to handle the demands of increased site traffic related to a new feature launch or other big event. Because you only pay for computing cycles used, EC2 is far more cost-effective than maintaining a physical server farm, where you are paying for computing horsepower and bandwidth whether you use it or not.

EC2 installations are perfect for multi-tiered web applications as well. In the fall of 2008, we hosted a brand new Search Engine, ubExact.com, on a seven-instance server cluster in our cloud. Whenever we needed to add another web server for load balancing or another application server, we were able to bring it online in minutes. During ubExact’s unfortunately short lifespan (victims of the initial economic downturn), we never experienced an outage related to server load or performance.

Do you have an application that is getting ready to go big-time, but are not sure if your current infrastructure can handle the pressure? Or are you simply paying too much in hardware and personnel costs to maintain your existing server farm? Contact us today to find out how looking to the clouds can take your website to new heights!

2 Comments to “Netphase Has Its Head In The Clouds”

  1. marty 20 August 2009 at 7:06 pm #

    Ubexact was great. I didn’t know you hosted their application. They had limited content, but their novel idea was a killer idea. Was sorry to see them go annd hope they come back sometime. I never experienced any down time using it.

  2. scottned 24 August 2009 at 11:08 am #

    Hey Marty,

    Thanks for the comment. It’s not clear from this post, but we also built ubExact. The people who had the original idea hired Netphase to bring it to life. After we launched, it turned out to be more difficult than expected for them to find advertisers (possibly due to what was happening in the economy this time last year). I heard that they did a demo a month ago, so there may yet be a future for it.


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