To the Cloud

A lot has changed in this industry since we opened our doors as Larry Smith Advertising some 37 years ago. As the industry evolved, so did we. And when we came into the internet era as Traction Marketing Group, we grew our services to optimzie our clients' marketing efforts for the most intriguing platform we've ever seen - the web.

Our first foray into digital media was corporate websites. These days, a huge amount of our time is spent creating and strategizing for the digital realm. This includes everything from campaign-centric microsites to online display advertising, search marketing, and social media management, among others.

From this, we've learned something that most people never fully realize: Planning and designing a website is one thing, developing and building one is another. Sure they're tied together, but they are most definitely two different, autonomous animals. Like the majestic rhinoceros and the crazy little bird always sitting on his back. 

Recently, we realized how beneficial it would be to have design and development working side by side, so we bolstered our interactive department and brought it all in-house. And in doing so, we realized there was one piece of the digital puzzle still missing from our services. Hosting. It makes sense that if we're going to create, we should also be able to contain. 

We've varied our direction on this over the years, but recently have landed our hosting in a new place. The Cloud.

The cloud has gotten quite the buzz over the last year or two within our industry, and is about to become a simple household word when Apple releases iCloud out into the wild.

Before we talk about the advantages of our new hosting situation, let's be clear about what "cloud hosting" is.

Cloud hosting, like traditional web hosting, serves your website's files to the web. But it differs as its service is delivered from a large group of servers connected together (a cloud), rendering archaic the thought of actually owning a single server, maintaining it, and trusting it to work for you 24/7.

Sites on the servers can use resources from all the servers in that cloud. Processing power, hard drives, and memory are shared. Servers can be easily added or removed as necessary, and if one server is down, sites use resources from the many other servers instead.

Basically, there's power in numbers. Why have one server when you can launch a virtual one powered by thousands of them?

Here's a quick top-ten list of the advantages we and our clients are experencing from our new hosting setup in the cloud.

+ Our servers can be up & running in minutes
+ Cloud servers are scalable so we can increase or decrease resources without the troubles of migrating to other servers
+ For bigger sites we can spark fully customizable, dedicated servers with pay-as-you-go pricing
+ Get free CPU Bursting, giving us extra power from the cloud when it's readily available
+ We now manage our servers on-the-go with iOS apps, and can reboot or scale at a moment's notice
+ Our servers are RAID-10 protected to ensure quick, automated back-ups which happen daily and weekly
+ We score better up-time compared to typical hosting setups
+ There is no hardware to fuss with
+ New technology is seamlessly integrated into our servers as it becomes available
+ We take care of it all for you

Like the idea of hosting your site in the cloud? We've crunched all the numbers and have a several hosting options to suit the needs of about any site we could build. We look forward to talking with you.