New and noteworthy in hosting and the cloud 3/31/09

Securing Your Data in the Cloud: Omer Trajman writes about the major security considerations when hosting your application, especially databases for The Database Column. Two brief case studies describe his customer’s system architecture using Vertica for the Cloud databases hosted on Amazon EC2 that have a focus on security and privacy.

AWS “sucks the air out of the room.” Cuts EC2 costs by 50%: This post by Jonathan Siegel for the ELC Technologies blog clearly lays out the factors to consider when outsourcing your IT infrastructure to a virtualized environment such as Amazon Web Services, particularly the tradeoff between operational expenses and capital expenses.

9 Steps To A Happy Relationship With Your Hosting Provider: Preeti Pradhan and David Walsh from Web Hosting Search wrote a good overview for Smashing Magazine of the major issues you can use to start to differentiate between the endless number of different web hosting providers.