If you follow the techies on Twitter or read IT publications online, you’ve probably seen more than a few mentions of cloud computing. Even tech behemoth IBM runs TV ads on cloud computing, underscoring the confusion around what this new technology really is.

With the wealth of cloud products on the market, The Planet’s philosophy is that all of our products — cloud and otherwise — have to serve you, our customer. Our products have to be beneficial to your business. They should lower costs, make technology easier, speed up your environment or protect your data.

We introduced Storage Cloud last year as a way for customers to store data outside of their hosted server. You might be wondering, “How is Storage Cloud any more practical or beneficial than hosted storage in the server? Both are served over the Internet, aren’t they?”

There are three main differences between Storage Cloud and hosted storage:

1. Storage Cloud is metered, similar to your electricity bill. You pay only for what you use when you need to use it. If your storage needs vary considerably from month to month, it may be a good idea to store your files in the cloud rather than invest in an additional disk that may or may not be used — but will be paid for — in the next month.
2. Storage Cloud is scalable. Your storage needs aren’t limited by the capacity of any single disk, and your cost remains constant. Costs can even decrease as you consistently use higher volumes.
3. Storage Cloud is redundant and available as a service. Redundancy is available in hosted solutions with multiple disks and RAID, but in many cases, it’s not included by default.
4. Hosted storage mediums — internal disks, direct attached storage (DAS) or storage area networks (SAN) — are dedicated only to your hosted servers. Storage Cloud is more flexible. If you have a mix of on-premise servers and off-site clients (your laptop, for example), you could back up everything in one place.

When it comes to whether or not Storage Cloud is a more economical option, the answer isn’t cut and dry. Here’s an example of when it would make sense (from solely a cost perspective) to go with Storage Cloud over an additional disk for backups:

You purchase a new server from The Planet and run regular backups. You want to keep the most recent 20GB of backups, and you’re evaluating Storage Cloud against an additional disk in your machine. You’ve got 10GB of free cloud storage (included with all new server orders), bandwidth is free between your server and the cloud, and the second 10GB is 25 cents per GB (or $2.50) per month.

Those backups are being stored at less than the cost of adding any hard drives to your server, and you get the other inherent benefits of the cloud platform. As your volume of data increases, dedicated storage might become a cheaper alternative, so your decision to use Storage Cloud should be made based on the other benefits in the list above.

Storage Cloud isn’t going to be all things for all people. It’s a specific subset of our larger storage portfolio with its own benefits and use cases. For instance, if you’re storing a multi-gigabyte database, you should still consider internal storage or DAS first … Storage Cloud is an option, but it’s not always the best option for your needs. If you’ve got questions about the best storage vehicle for a given application, let us know and we’ll do our best to help!

If you’d like to learn more about The Planet Storage Cloud, visit http://www.theplanet.com/cloud-storage.

-Rob