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In the recent years we have seen a growth and improvisation in the cloud hosting platforms. Various web hosting companies have emerged as strong cloud hosting players. In the year 2011, the cloud hosting market has seen a revolution, empowered by the development of enterprise-class cloud virtualization infrastructure along with concentrating on factors like efficiency, stability, security and scalability of cloud hosting solutions. This has resulted in an increase in new categories of value-added cloud services including prominent sectors like mobile, media, finance and analytics. On the basis of the developments that took place in 2011, here is an insight on what you can expect from cloud hosting and open source software applications in the year 2012.

Public Cloud For Disaster Recovery Planning

The current economic scenario will intensify the drive of the enterprises to find ways for curbing the in-house IT resources. Enterprises will also consider cost cutting by improving the efficiency of their server and application infrastructures. Disaster recovery planning increases the costs for the business enterprises as a fully redundant server infrastructure has the be maintained. A number of established cloud hosting service providers have started incorporating disaster recovery services with a view to improvise on the security aspect. Such services will move into the mainstream during 2012 as more and more companies begin to understand the importance of the cloud hosting platform, not just to improve the affordability but also for reducing the recovery times to a great extent. The cloud hosting platform provides benefits in terms of savings on hardware and personnel. Further development of network replication services, that might seem to be unreasonably expensive and difficult to test in a conventional DR system, provides a pathway to the speedy recovery in the cloud. Cloud hosting platform comprises of smartly architectured “elastic” applications that provides the enterprises the opportunity to utilize cloud-based disaster recovery infrastructure for dealing with additional load spikes during the operations.

Importance of open source applications

With an improvisation in internet, open source software applications are considered as a hidden layer of code backing up the operating infrastructure. Open source has been largely utilized to complement and improve the commercial offerings and to implement the most efficient class of services. With time, open source solutions have become the “best in class” software, and some of them have developed great reputations for being the most powerful and flexible. The leading players in the hosting industry and enterprise markets are more inclined towards the open source products for establishing commercial offerings and the obvious reason is the economical and efficient approach involved.

While its evident that the most powerful open source solutions have now established a satisfactory credibility level that makes the choice more obvious. The seasoned IT professionals regard the open source applications as the most secured and trusted ones – mainly because of their openness, that enables independent assessment, encourages quality code writing and simplifies the tasks of making extensions and bug patching. Another important advantage of open source applications is that it enables the companies to avoid vendor lock-in, which further reduces the dependence on expensive product support and premature obsolescence. The fact is that the open source products are typically developed under the guidance of an active user and developer community where organic evolution is integral to the culture. This goes on to say that selecting the open source software applications is a viable option for the enterprises mainly for the establishment of commercial grade services in context of today’s fast-changing and dynamic marketplace.

It is not surprising that the in-house developers and internet giants are already using the open source technology on a regular basis. In fact, some of the leading open source products are now securely backed by larger commercial entities. This adds to the current improvements, support and reliability – along with a higher level of confidence for using the open source product. The technological advancements and the platform provided by the open source applications make them a complete value for money.

Hosting companies and open source technology

In the year 2011, we saw the website hosting companies explore more options for achieving higher efficiency, scalability and security. As the industry becomes more competitive in 2012, you will witness more hosting companies looking for products, free or commercial, that will enable them to achieve true scalability without making major investments in new hardware and ensuring the quality at the same time. Moreover these products should be easy to deploy and use, so that establishing a new service like SaaS or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) becomes easy.

Mobile broadband services

Adapting to the internet-connected mobile services is a fast growing trend, exceeding the historical adoption rates for television and the desktop Internet. This trend is accompanied by an avalanche of new mobile devices, machine-to-machine applications and an improvisation in the rich media content for mobile. With 27% mobile smartphone penetration, there’s still plenty of room to grow. Mobile broadband providers encounter serious challenges as they struggle in terms of growing their signaling and traffic offload capabilities.

In 2012, many telecoms companies will look forward in terms of exploring more flexible alternatives for the expensive hardware solutions. There is a high possibility of the virtualized cloud environment to grow rapidly, without limits. We expect to see new products in the market, enabling seamless integration of mobile radio and voice infrastructure with a virtualized signaling and data offload infrastructure ‘in the cloud’ data processing technology based on the cloud will give the carriers the capacity to expand as per the demand – predictably, securely, and economically.

Cloud hosting trends that one can look forward to 2012

* An increase in the private cloud adaption for making the best use of the cloud hosting platform.
* Hybrid cloud is here for the long run as it offers more stability and security to the business.
* An increase in the application specific cloud communities
* An increase in managed cloud hosting services fully equipped with the latest technologies.
* Disaster recovery and scaling would be the major factors for deploying the cloud hosting platform.

In 2012′s stringent economic environment, companies will accelerate their network and IT infrastructure development with a view of optimal cost-savings and extreme efficiency and the cloud hosting platform will be in the limelight along with the support of the open source applications; this will create a perfect platform for ensuring the scalability of the business. Timely and smart use of the cloud hosting platform and open source technology will surely provide benefits in terms of creating a unique identity and dominating the competition.

With the advent of technology and growth in the number of websites, establishing an online brand has become essential for every business that wants to stay in the competition. The online presence of the brand determines its success. A website can be utilized as the medium or the business itself. Just like the real life, your brand is your identity on the web as well and differentiates you from your competitors. Online branding determines the perception of targeted audience towards your business. Moreover research has proved that internet shopping is highly brand-centered as online users don’t get the liberty of touching and feeling products before purchasing them online. Therefore a brand value has to be created to build a reputation online. Here are afew simple strategies that you can use to establish a successful online brand.

Domain name
The domain name that you select plays a very important role in determining your online presence. It is essential to select a name that is unique, easy to remember and, if possible, highlights the nature of your business and the products/services you sell online. If you have a unique selling preposition that out-smarts your competitors, you can consider adding a word or two about it in the domain name. The domain name that you select for your website can have a huge impact in the way that individuals and search engine spiders perceive it. You can also add specific keywords to your domain name. Better recognition can be gained from a domain name that is catchy and unusual. Make sure that your domain name is such that is easy to keep in mind so that when people think of their products/services you are providing, they should only think about your domain name. Domain name is the initial step of building your online credibility, so make sure to get an impressive domain name.

Study Your Audience
In order to establish an online brand, it is essential to have a clear understanding of your audience, especially before you start working on creating content strategies and communication plans. Fortunately, you will come across various tools online that can help you in terms of identifying your target audience. These tools will enable you to know more about your audience. Determine your target audience and then plan in terms of the resources where you should be creating a web presence.

Social Media Integration
Ask yourself questions like what do you want your brand to say or do online? What types of interactions do you want your consumers to have with your business? What is right for you? Facebook or Twitter? You might not have the answers to all these questions at this point of time, but with a little research it will be easy for you to understand where your audience is and which way is right to interact with them. Start by studying and analyzing who is talking about your brand. If no one is, then you can start a conversation. However you must remember that it is a conversation leading to interaction, it should not be a means to force a message on consumers. Your brand will be on the path to growth and popularity within a short span of time if you use the social media platform intelligently.

Identify Your Uniqueness
Think about what sets you apart from the other professionals in your field? What are your unique achievements? These factors are important and they have an impact on the reputation of your brand. In order to establish a brand online, you need to have a good grasp on the factors that set you apart from the competition. You have to be unique for getting success through online marketing. Have fun expressing yourself creatively through words and being an inspiration to many people. When you identify the unique factors about your business, it would be easy to plan the marketing strategies and move towards establishing a stronger brand.

The Importance Of Unique Content
It is a proven fact that content is king, many online businesses have been solely built on the back of content and unique content is one of the most prominent ways of building a brand. Social networks and content go hand in hand. With the emergence of the social networking websites, delivering content has become a bit effortless. Use this to your benefit and “get known for something” while creating and distributing your content. You can decide to give a funny, goofy, serious, or any other look to your content however it is essential to make sure that it creates an impact. When your brand starts getting recognition for something, you can take it that you are on the right path to creating a lasting impression online.

Search Engine Rankings
Getting good rankings in prominent search engines like Google and Yahoo can help you in terms of establishing a brand. People often see the first few rankings as market leaders within that specific search criteria. Securing a good ranking surely carries more benefits than just leads and sales. Statistics show that 42% of all searchers click on the website link that is listed on the first position. Ranking first means much more visibility and free marketing. Initially it might take some time to secure a good ranking; however if you are using the SEO strategies perfectly, it wouldn’t take much time to achieve a good position in the search engines. Most of the websites do not rank well until years of trust and lots of organic looking links. You can start the search engine optimization by simple strategies like article submissions, blogging, social bookmarking and creating a presence on the social networking websites. Most essential aspect is getting backlinks for your websites. The search engine ranking of your website would surely increase with more authoritative backlinks coming to your website.

Along with all the strategies mentioned above, it is also essential to host your website with an appropriate website hosting plan. A good web hosting plan will ensure the uptime and speed of your website and this will help in terms of creating better online visibility. All these factors have to be taken into consideration because establishing an online brand grows beyond creating a website. Without establishing a brand for your website, it will only linger in the periphery as just one among the others. Moreover along with adopting all the strategies mentioned above, it is also essential to be consistent with brand building strategies to get maximum exposure on the net.