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Cloud or Server? Open question to any for help

Small start-up in Sonoma.

Home Performance contracting business. Energy Efficiency experts.

We take hundreds of photos of the homes we evaluate (3-5mb ea.) Later we select some to include to report for home owner.

Question: I would love to have a cloud based solution vs. our own server.

Concern is slow upload / download: I prefer to use full resolution images. Using DSL to access the I-net. (perhaps cable modem at best).

In the past we have filed photos on local server to avoid speed issues. Now need multiple people to have remote access.

Is there a cloud a solution for us?

What about a "local" cloud type solution in our office, for fast uploads and then the web for occasional downloads. (e.g. Iomega Cloud or ????? )

Interested to see what options exist.

Thanks

Charley Cormany

415 509 1726

Tags: Cloud

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Permalink Reply by Chip Roberson on April 18, 2011 at 11:17pm

We use Rackspace's CloudServers and find we have very fast speeds. As with most cloud servers, you can run into the "noisy neighbor" problem but we haven't really experienced it. Rackspace is one of the industry leaders and their systems have been excellent for us. You can also look at the other providers but it was so easy to get a server up and to resize on demand that we stuck with Rackspace.

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Permalink Reply by Sam Taylor on April 19, 2011 at 11:44am

I'm betting that since you're a start-up you want to keep costs down, so before I went into a full-bore cloud solution like Rackspace, you might want to check out solutions like Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com) or the Google Docs part of Google Apps.

Dropbox is an excellent tool and amazingly useful for both public and private sharing. It keeps a local copy on your computer or server and syncs a copy to the cloud in the background.

You will be hobbled somewhat no matter what you do by your internet speeds so a sync service that operates behind the scenes rather than a direct upload might suit you well. And Dropbox is cheap.