Nearly 50 years ago, the Virginia State Travel Service hit it big with its famous “Virginia is for Lovers” slogan. Ashburn, located in Loudoun County, Virginia, caters to a specific form of lover: tech professionals who love Ashburn’s access to what has been called “the bullseye of America’s Internet.” (more…)

If you need the lowest latency and fastest routes to 70 percent of the world’s web traffic, our new Ashburn, VA (USA-EAST-3) location is now available. This latest addition is located in the heart of the world’s data center capital. You can now utilize our full suite of hosting services with the same power, speed, and reliability Atlantic.Net is known for in our Ashburn, VA (USA-EAST-3) location: (more…)

Until recently, businesses adapted to the computer age by purchasing desktop systems and possibly servers, to run a local area network, and maybe a website. IT needs have changed, however, with cloud-based productivity applications, electronic records, and mobile workforces. Keeping up with these and related innovations is vital to business efficiency and profitability, but IT teams tasked with making every digital element in the organization work — and work together – are often overwhelmed, leading to system failures and major problems for business operations.

Businesses typically have different expectations from their IT systems than even a decade ago, and therefore should adapt their approach to IT.  For many, this means closing down that old server room; the number of businesses hosting their network on-premises is projected to fall from 31 percent to 17 percent by 2018. Correspondingly, budget allocations for hosting services will rise by an average of 20 percent for 2017, according to 451 Research.

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Availability is one of the biggest concerns of information technology chiefs. The NIH ran a study comparing availability of cloud and dedicated machines. Cloud won.

• Availability Among Top Three CIO Concerns
• Availability: Cloud Hosting vs. Dedicated Servers
• Cloud for Fast Processing of Huge Datasets

Availability Among Top Three CIO Concerns

Unfortunately for CIOs, there are many aspects of their role that can be stressful. For a survey featured in CIO magazine in 2015, 276 CIOs and other top IT leaders discussed the elements that can give them the most trouble; and the top three were security, availability, and making the right hires.

Let’s look specifically at the issue of downtime; in other words, the need to optimize availability.

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In the age of cloud server hosting, as it’s increasingly adopted by enterprises, chief information officers can struggle to maintain operational excellence. Here’s how to deliver consistency with OE as you adopt cloud.

• Challenges of the Multiple-Vendor Cloud World
• Knowing What You Mean by “Operational Excellence”
• Partner with the Provider so You Can Achieve OE
• Governance of the OE Plan
• Protecting Your Partnerships
• Choosing a Strong, Secure Cloud Hosting Partner

Challenges of the Multiple-Vendor Cloud World

In 2016, the business world is benefiting from an increasingly broad variety of cloud tools; and the extent to which they are being adopted continues to grow. For information chiefs in enterprises with sizable on-site app hosting infrastructures who are in the process of adopting cloud more aggressively, you are going to face some threats to the continuity of strong computing operations. In a multi-vendor hosting scenario (i.e., that of cloud), on-site ways to check systems, strategize for disaster recovery, process transactions, manage system modifications, and schedule tasks are a few examples of the many IT responsibilities that can become unexpectedly complicated. Leaders both in business and IT will often not think it’s necessary to pay as much attention to these elements in the expanding cloud climate. However, everything must be integrated in some manner, and with the multi-cloud or multi-vendor situation which is becoming so common, it’s challenging for the quality of operations of your IT services not to suffer.

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As businesses tried to determine whether they should continue to keep their IT on-site or process it with third-party cloud hosts, many ended up choosing a compromise: hybrid cloud.

• The Hybrid Cloud: What is it?
• Why do Some Companies Choose Hybrid?
• Hybrid Doesn’t Always Make Sense
• Examples of Hybrid Cloud Use
• Strong Hosting Partner for Your Hybrid Cloud

For the first few years that cloud was becoming prominent, it was praised by IT and finance professionals. However, those who were working with extremely sensitive or mission-critical systems remained reluctant about the technology. What enterprises started to do was strike a balance and adopt the hybrid model, rather than going all-in with either in-house or public systems.

The Hybrid Cloud: What is it?

A hybrid cloud mixes together public cloud hosting from an infrastructure-as-a-service vendor (a company that provides cloud servers) with a private cloud set up internally. In other words, the public and private cloud systems are distinct and established in separate locations, each with their own data centers and specifications. They interact through an encrypted connection which allows apps and information to flow between the two.

It’s critical to understand that hybrid is not one cloud with public and private aspects but two completely different clouds joined together, notes James Sanders of ZDNet. “This allows organizations to store protected or privileged data on a private cloud, while retaining the ability to leverage computational resources from the public cloud to run applications that rely on this data,” he says.

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Previously, companies were unsure about cloud. Now, adoption of the technology in business settings is rising steadily, thanks in large part to the success of the consumer cloud. Here are stats and interesting facts.

•  Trust in Cloud Rising Fast
• Growth of Cloud – Stats
• Six Day-to-Day Cloud Truths
• Cloud Really Can be a Breeze

Trust in Cloud Rising Fast

Mobile devices and touchscreen PCs are a big part of the past decade of computing, but an even more significant advance is the rise of cloud technology. However, that road hasn’t been easy. The majority of enterprises used to be unsure about using cloud because they wanted their own server, with their own security precautions. Plus, they worried about integration between on-premises and cloud systems.

Everything is different following the success of the consumer cloud. Basically think about whatever files you used to store on your own computer but now keep at a distance. Examples include YouTube for videos, iTunes for music, and Instagram for photos. Cloud is part of our daily lives.

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Why is Redis becoming such a popular key-value data store? Here is a look at the many reasons it’s succeeding.

• Basic Strengths of Redis
• Built for Speed & Languages
• The Crowd Says Yes
• In-Memory Processing for Media
• Leaderboard Delivery
• Redis-Ready Cloud Servers

Basic Strengths of Redis

Redis is a data structure server. As a key-value data store, Redis is similar to Memcached, although it has two major advantages over that option: support of additional datatypes and persistence.

Those two features may not immediately appear “major,” but they really do set this ecosystem apart. Persistence allows you to treat Redis as a legitimate database rather than an unstable and temporary cache. If you reboot, Memcached information is lost; but Redis data remains.

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