Over the last few months, I’ve received a ton of emails asking about my cloud network. Every email I’ve received included the same question, “how did you build your own cloud network and what do I have to do to build my own?” Believe it or not, building my own cloud network was extremely easy. With that said, let me begin by explaining why building my own cloud network was a good choice. First, I got tired of having to pay to use the Amazon EC2 and Google’s AppEngine. Although those are both great services, I thought I would be better off spending that money on something else. By investing that money into my own cloud network, I could easily get some of my investment back if I wanted by selling off the hardware.
The second reason I wanted to pursue my own cloud was because I already own a company that provides web design and hosting. Until recently, all of our hosting was done on a series of single servers. However, this was beginning to become costly for myself as well as my customers when it came time to scale. By providing a cloud network, each of my hosted websites automatically get resources allocated to them as the demand increases. Just like the Amazon EC2, when traffic slowed back down, the resources are automatically deallocated and the customer no longer pays for the extra resources.
The third reason I needed a cloud was for virtualization. I needed the ability to provide on-demand scalability on-the-fly. This is something I couldn’t do with single, standalone servers. Some of my customers run Virtual Machines (VM) on their hosted servers. Since a VM cannot be scaled beyond the resources available on the single server, something more robust was needed. Without a cloud, I would have to manually migrate the VMs to new servers once they grew too big for the one they were currently on.
I have a few other reasons for building my own cloud networks. But, the 3 I’ve mentioned should be plenty for now.
In this article, I will walk you thru the steps I used for building my own cloud networks. I will introduce you to the free, open source software I chose for constructing my cloud and introduce you to a site that you can get server equipment pretty cheap. The coolest part about my cloud network is that it runs on normal, every day, inexpensive equipment that you can pick up anywhere, including the site I’m about to show you. Using the method outlined here, you will be able to scale your cloud network by simply adding more inexpensive computers. This is the same technique that the big guys such as Google and Facebook use. So, let’s get started.
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For those of you that follow me on Twitter and / or subscribe to my newsletters, you’ve probably noticed that I use a URL shortener for links to my articles. Since the URL for this website is fairly long (http://www.prodigyproductionsllc.com), shortening the full URL is a must. Not only does this make the URLs easier to post on websites and Twitter, it also makes the URLs easier to remember, pass along via word of mouth, and for sending via text messaging. But, how did I start my own URL shortening website? Good question. That’s what I’m going to teach you to do now.
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First off, what is a domain name? A domain name is a title that identifies your website. Just as you have a first and last name, a domain name does too. The first name of a domain is the most important part. It is the piece that people will use to identify your website. It’s the piece that comes between the “www” and “.com” or “.net”. More on that in a minute. For now, the “last name” of a domain name identifies what type of website it is. Domain names ending in “.com” are the most common here in the U.S.A. “com” is short for “commercial”, but doesn’t always mean “business”. There are other types of domains such as “.net”, “.org”, “.edu”, and many others. But, for our needs, we need to focus on “.com” since the majority of our customers are more familiar with it. Domain names are components of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL – Wikipedia). A domain name can point to multiple IP addresses to provide server redundancy. However, we’re only going to be needing one IP address to point to; the IP address of our web host provider.
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In previous posts, I showed you how to build a website using WordPress and how to pick a web host. Now it’s time to learn how to install WordPress in our newly hosted web space. Don’t fret if you’ve never done anything like this. WordPress makes it EXTREMELY simple to install using their “famous 5-minute install”. The first thing you’ll need to do is to setup your wp-config.php file as shown here.
After you’ve setup the configuration file (wp-config.php), it is time to upload your website to your web host. There are several tools you can use for uploading websites and if you’re using Windows, I would recommend using WinSCP. WinSCP is a free / open source client used for the File Transfer Protocol (FTP – Wikipedia). You can download WinSCP from http://winscp.net/eng/download.php. Once you’ve downloaded WinSCP, run the installer and follow the on-screen instructions. (Tip: You can pretty much just keep clicking the “Next” button until you’ve made it through the install process.)
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Now that you know how to build a website using WordPress, it’s time to do something with it. The first thing you need to do is to find someone to host your site. There are plenty of choices out there and 
picking one all boils down to what you need. For running WordPress, you will need a host that provides PHP support and a MySQL database. As long as you have those, it doesn’t really matter who you use. In fact, I own a business that does website design and hosting. So, if you don’t feel like sifting through all of the hosts out there, feel free to contact me through the contact page or send an email to hosting@prodigyproductionsllc.com and I’ll be glad to hook you up with everything you need for only $5.00 per month. I will even install WordPress on your site to get you going for a one time fee of just $25.00. I’ll provide you with unlimited disk space, unlimited MySQL tables, and even unlimited transfer. We are currently in the process of building a new cloud network and once finished, I will be glad to move your site into our cloud free of charge. (Cloud Computing – Wikipedia)
In my last article (“Building a Website“), I showed you how to build a website using WordPress. In my next article, I will show you how to install WordPress on your new website and how to use themes to make it look nice.
