CLOUD score - Godaddy versus Dyn

We recently reviewed both DynECT Managed DNS and GoDaddy DNS and our analysis shows Dyn to be a better fit for us. Both scored well, GoDaddy with a 73 and Dyn with an 81. Either would be a good choice.

Both offer reliable service, yes even though GoDaddy had an outage recently, they are still reliable. Both have multiple data centers globally, though Dyn has more and in more areas too, IE South America. If you are global that matters. If you are US or US. EMEA, APAC only it may not be a big deal.

Contract wise they are comparable, which means there are things in both we don't like. The GoDaddy SLA was actually better. If they miss their 99.999% goal then you get 2 months free. (If you got a 2 month free from the last outage we would love to hear it, always good to confirm)

Where Dyn really excels is on the relationship. GoDaddy really seems to focus on the smaller shops and expects you to do most of the shopping online with a credit card. Dyn has an account team that can talk to you, explain their products and provide that advice and, well relationship that I think is important.

GoDaddy though is cheaper, has the better SLA and better support hours, though I felt that their support, at least when I tested it, was a little less technical than Dyn. I asked about backing up my DNS records and GoDaddy suggested taking a screen shot, even though they have an option to export. Not a wrong answer, but if I had a lot of records it could be many screen shots and manually having to enter them would not be fun.

GoDaddy also offer more services. I can do web hosting, email hosting and even get them to help with my web design. We didn't look at those services, but there is something to be said for having your hosting and your registration be the same company.

Both Dyn and GoDaddy reserve the right to terminate you at any time. There were at least a few complaints about GoDaddy doing that to protect against fraud, which is good, but getting things turned back on seemed painful. That makes sense since there is no account team to help.

In summary, if company relationship and personal support is important to you for DNS, stick with Dyn.

If you want cheap and easy and are looking to host a website as well, GoDaddy can be a good option.

AWS stands alone

CIO recently ran an article about Amazon Web Services and the fact that Gartner claims they are pretty much well ahead of the pack in the leadership space of IaaS. This is not that surprising, I mean Amazon was one of the first to offer cloud computing first with EC2 (elastic computing) and S3 (Storage) and now with AWS. When you help to define a market, being seen as the leader of it is really yours to lose.

We are actually just starting to use Amazon for Infrastructure, though we have used a lot of SaaS vendors, like Salesforce.com, Okta and Google. In fact the event that made the change a priority for us was a data center move. The move will take us 46 hours (according to the plan) and being without our primary web site for that long wasn't a real popular thought, so we moved it to AWS. 

We chose them because it was so easy. Setting an account up is easy, adding machines is a snap and when we decided this morning we really needed a SQL database to go along with it for some of our applications, it took minutes to provision that too. It's cheap, especially for short term needs like this, and can easily fit on a credit card and be expensed to the company. Many people underestimate how important that is, but that ability to work within financial guidelines is a big deal.

We will find out this weekend how it works, but so far I'm impressed. 

Scorethecloud - Cloud consulting company of the year Finalist

Thanks to everyone that voted for us for the "Best cloud consulting 2012" from UP 2012. We made it to the finalist round which was a great accomplishment for such a new company!

Everyone always says it is an honor to be nominated and we agree. Making it to the final round is pretty great too!

In 2013 we will get our application live so everyone can score their cloud vendors and get useful data from the global cloud user base. We also hope to upgrade our website and get even more social. 

Stay tuned!

Watch out ... terms are changing

The great pace of change in real cloud vendors is what really makes them attractive. Unfortunately that ease of changes also has a dark side. This month two big names in cloud decided to change their terms of usage.

Most cloud vendors use a neat trick like pointing their terms of use to a web page with a notice that they are allowed to change the terms at any time with no notice. We have been warning about this practice for a while and this week shows why that can be a dangerous trap.

Let's look at instagram. They decided to change their terms to allow them to sell your pictures without paying you a dime or even having to tell you. Now I know that instagram is free and they have a lot of expensive infrastructure to support all the users they have. Someone has to pay for it.

But imagine if you are a celebrity whose face and or likeness is actually worth a lot of money, say Mila Kunis or Robert Pattinson. You happen to have used Instagram in the past and all of a sudden they can use your face and likeness to sell other products. I'm also a little unclear on what happens if I don't agree and terminate my account. Here's why. Under "General Conditions" paragraph 3 it says

".....You agree that we may notify you of the Updated Terms by posting them on the Service, and that your use of the Service after the effective date of the Updated Terms (or engaging in such other conduct as we may reasonably specify) constitutes your agreement to the Updated Terms......"

That seems fair. If you disagree stop using it.

But in paragraph 1 of the same section it says

"...If we terminate your access to the Service or you use the form detailed above to deactivate your account, your photos, comments, likes, friendships, and all other data will no longer be accessible through your account (e.g., users will not be able to navigate to your username and view your photos),..."


So far so good I can delete my account and not have to worry about it right?? Keep reading


 but those materials and data may persist and appear within the Service (e.g., if your Content has been reshared by others).

OK If my data still persists does that mean I am "engaging in such other conduct as we may reasonable specify" constitutes my agreement? I'd hope not since I tried to cancel my account but courts can be weird some times. Frankly I'd be shocked if that were the case but I'd hate to be the one to have to pay a lawyer to find out. The bigger issue is what if you didn't know that the terms changed.

Google also changed their terms for the business free version of Google Apps. They handled it a bit better since they "grandfathered" people whose account was created before the announced it. My Google account from earlier this year is still free and will continue to be free, but if anyone going forward wants one, they need to pay.

That just feels like a "fairer" way of dealing with changes. It let's the turn an incredibly popular service into a way to make money without penalizing the people that helped it become an incredibly popular service.

Google and Instagram aren't the first vendors to change the rules and I'm sure they won't be the last ones either. Personally the way Instagram handled the change would annoy me if I were a user of their service. It just feels a little sneaky and devious. The Google approach seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Nasuni and cloud storage

I had a chance to meet with the CEO from Nasuni yesterday, Andres Rodriguez (@
nasunista), and get a look at what they are doing. Wow Cool stuff. We will work up a cloudscore for them soon but they said all the right things. 

But first let me back up. A few months ago at VTUG's Fall Forward event I got to hear Steve Duplessie (@stevedupe) from ESG talk about the future of storage. One of the things that stuck with me was his idea that virtual storage controllers were the next big storage thing. I didn't quite get it then, some times it takes a little time to roll around my brain before it settles in, but after looking at Nasuni I get it.

Normally storage controllers are tied to the physical storage, but imagine if they were not. Nasuni essentially builds a controller (and NFS,CIFS, iSCSI front end) that is independent to the storage. In fact the back end storage they use now is Amazon S3.

They have a local cache to get rid of the performance concerns but all the storage, replication, backups etc are done with S3. In fact someone used the analogy (and I love analogies) that it is like EMC + Akamai.

They encrypt the data and the customer has the keys so compliance and security should not be a concern. S3 is super reliable when configured correctly and if the on site box crashes you can configure a new virtual one in 15 minutes.

The other interesting thing that they are not doing yet, but probably can, is connect to other types of storage. Imagine, if you had box, amazon, dropbox and local storage all managed through this one virtual controller. Also, since we are making stuff up, that you can scale multiple ones of these together to get super high  performance, only limited by the network connection. With 100Gb Ethernet on the radar that's a pretty good size data pipe. String 10 of these in parallel you could get 1Tb access speeds to unlimited data. Talk about big data....

The other thing that they do that is pretty unique is you pay only for usable storage, not usage, not snapshots or number of users. This makes it really easy to understand the cost. It is literally COST X  USABLESTORAGE.

When comparing costs though you do need to factor in some of the other benefits you get. Disaster recovery is built in. No need to replicate data, or buy extra hardware, you can literally configure a VM appliance in minutes, or have it already running in the second (or third) sites. You get centralized storage in the cloud with data backups for free too. Which saves a lot of compliance headaches and missed tape pickups..

Still working on the math to see if this is cheaper or not than local storage, plus backup licenses and media, plus a hot DR site plus the time to manage it plus the WAN link etc... I'm thinking it will be pretty close.

Cloud gives the ultimate in flexibility

In today's world it's important that companies be nimble and flexible. Things change too quick to be stuck with a rigid infrastructure, processes or mindset.

This is where cloud, in particular SAAS, really come into play. In my opinion cloud for cost savings is short sighted, not that there can't be cost savings, but that should not be the reason to go cloud. It's really about being faster and more flexible.

Imagine two companies, one with on premise infrastructure and one cloud based. Both want to merge with another company and add 1000 "new" employees to their email system because of it. The on-premise company needs to upgrade it's email servers, storage, add backup licenses and add the new users. Let's assume they are all outlook users and don't need training since it's the same interface. Still adding servers and storage (and possible network ports) can take a month and cost $50,000. If disaster recovery is important (and it should be) you may need to double that.

Now the cloud based company simply process a change order (or whatever paperwork is required  to add 1000 new users and add's their accounts. This can literally be done in a week. Technically hours, but there is usually some level of financial approval required for an additional monthly cost like that.

The other way cloud makes you more flexible is the fact that upgrades can happen with no real IT work needed. Now IT needs to spend time on testing the new features, figuring out use cases and then training the user community on the best way to leverage them, but they should do that for on-premise features too.

Please vote for us

We were recently nominated for "Best cloud consulting 2012" from UP 2012 and are hoping to win at their Third Annual Global Cloud Computing Conference taking place on December 12th in San Francisco.

We are honored and are really hoping to win and need your help.

If you think CLOUDscores and scorethecloud help, we would love it if you would go to http://up-con.com/vote?page=19 and vote for us. We are up against some big names and tough competition, though we think we are better, just not bigger, so every vote helps!