… the F6 blog

Most know what web hosting is and does. For those that don’t, web hosting is what you have when you put your website on a server somewhere. That somewhere can be in your basement but, more often than not for small businesses, that somewhere is with a web hosting company that owns the server where your website sits.

You put your website files on that server. Sometimes you type your site content into an online editor but, usually, you create the files on your computer and put them on the server. You use the same process when you type in your latest blog entry or post a video on YouTube. But, whatever the case, your content isn’t on your computer.

Hosting is convenient and simple to access. The server is always there and you don’t have to necessarily be at your computer to get to the files. Now what if you could put content besides videos, blogs, or websites on these servers? You could put your documents, spreadsheets, presentations, sales data … a lot of the content your business uses every day. Now what if you could not only store those files but create and edit them, too, right from your Internet-connected computer?

That’s the concept of cloud computing. The idea is you would work through just your web browser and create and edit all the content you need for your life or your business. Instead of using Microsoft Word on your computer, you’d use an online document editor like Yahoo! Zoho, Google Docs, or Adobe Buzzword. These applications work within your web browser and let you create, manage, share, and store your documents on that company’s servers, ready for you to access with a web browser whenever you or someone you designate want.

That’s perhaps, for small business, one of the attractions of cloud computing: the ability to share your documents with others without having to email them back and forth. The email method of sharing files is the Internet-connected version of “sneakernet,” which is what you have when people used to share documents by constantly putting files on floppy disks or CDs and manually running them over to the other person. It was tedious and you never knew if you had the latest version. Today, years later, we still have the same problem with sneakernet for email.

But, cloud computing isn’t for everyone. For one thing, you have to carefully read the terms of usage. Make sure that you own the content you create and not the cloud computing company. Make sure you know how your data is used … is your usage information aggregated for use in research or, even worse, sold?

Also be careful to whom you give access. Just because you intended to give someone access temporarily doesn’t mean that the person will graciously stop accessing your documents when you say so. Make sure you keep up with whom you give these documents and remove access privileges as necessary.

Next, make sure you change your password for the service every now and then. We’ve all heard how important it is to change passwords so I won’t go further.

Finally, remember you’ll need an Internet connection, usually a fast one, to use these services and do something as simple as get a file you wrote yesterday. If you’re on the road often with no network connection, cloud computing may not be for you.