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Traditionally businesses need to maintain the computing infrastructure to run core business applications. With  increasing exposure to web technologies, this infrastructure has grown both in size and in complexity. While every application needs to have its own development, test and productive landscape, the real complexity has come from business as well as regulatory requirements, such as disaster recovery and high availability.

SMBs do have the choice to use managed hosting services to address some of the issues in the core infrastructure management. Services such as IBM's "Apps on Demand" , can provide managed (but static) infrastructure. While there are "Pay as you Go " models available in managed hosting, both the speed and flexibility are highly compromised.

The new generation "Cloud Hosting" services such as " Amazon EC2" and "Go Grid" have ultimately reduced infrastructure hosting to a child's play.

Amazon Cloud Hosting Services

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2™) – A web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Configure an Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) and load it into the Amazon EC2 service. Quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. ›Learn more about Amazon EC2™

• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3™) – A simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve large amounts of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. ›Learn more about Amazon S3™

Go Grid

From any web browser you can:

• Deploy or delete web or database cloud servers
• Add free f5 hardware load balancing
• Add mountable, infinitely scalable cloud storage
• Monitor your usage and costs in real-time
• and much more...

Google App Engine

Google has taken a different approach in application hosting. Unlike Amazon and GoGrid , Google does not provide a virtual server. You can rather host your application directly into Google cloud without having  to worry about anything at all about the sub-structure of your application.

Google promises to  provide same infrastructure to third party apps as is available to its own applications such a Gmail. This,  obviously is a much better choice for small businesses but there is a little catch

• As of today ( June 20 ,09) , support is only available for applications written in Python or Java.
• Only Web Applications are supported.
  
• Even for web applications (Java and Python) , there is a little bit of tweaking required to adaptt o Google APIs.
• Google provides an SDK for "App Engine" . The idea is that there is some programming background needed to host the application.  Once application is hosted , there is a  very good dashboard available to to review the performance and many other parmeters of aplication.
  

In nutshell , Google App Engine is most afforrdable and best choice for Java and Python b ased web applications provided business is willing to invest a little in development effort.

Microsoft Azure

In line with Google's App Engine , MS is building .NET services in Cloud.  I haven't yet recd my token for testing out the Windows Azure services yet. Please stay tuned for more on this in coming weeks.