Cloud Based Services With Free Trial Offers

Many businesses are looking to the clouds as an opportunity to save capital investment and ongoing operating and maintenance costs. This is a hot field, with vendors scrambling to get in and establish themselves in the space. But how do you know what services are right for your needs?

It’s especially important for small businesses with limited resources to be sure they are getting the most for their IT and telephone dollars. One way to be sure is to try before you buy. With that in mind, we’ve complied a selection of cloud based services that offer a free trial period before you make a commitment.

Atlantic.Net offers a free trial of cloud hosting as an alternative to virtual private servers. Their platform is designed to let you build, test and deploy Windows or Linux servers in the cloud in a matter of seconds. You can run whatever software you need and pay by the hour for only the resources that you use. Atlantic.Net is committed to 100% uptime on their SAS 70 certified hosting solution.

BrowserMob offers a free trial of website load testing in the cloud. It’s important to know what your ecommerce or other web properties can handle before you miss an important sales opportunity because your site crashed from too much traffic. Run concurrent tests with real browsers, not simply HTTP requests. This service scales up to 5,000 concurrent browsers and 500,000 users with over 6,000 Mbps maximum data throughput to to handle the largest sites. Responsive expert testing advice helps you get results quickly.

Do spend a lot of time and money sending documents out for signature? RightSignature offers a 5 document free trial of their cloud-based document signature service. Rather than faxing or overnight mailing paper documents and waiting for them to be signed and returned, signers go online and create legally valid electronic signatures. You simply create your documents using standard office tools and then upload them to RightSignature. Then send out an email message with a link to your online document. The system creates a document signature certificate with signer information, audit long and unique ID number. Archiving is online, too, so you never have to hunt for a document again.

The rest of your paper documents also belong in the cloud. Shoeboxed offers a free trial of their document scanning and storage service in the cloud. This is perfect for anyone in business who deals with expense report receipts, business cards and other day to day documents that pile up on the desk. You can scan and file it yourself or Shoeboxed will do it for a very reasonable price. You just drop your papers in a secure mailer and soon they’ll show up on a secure online database. More than mere scanning, the actual information on the page is loaded into the database where you can export it to Excel, Salesforce, Outlook or other program of your choice.

Customer service is important for any company. Assistly offer a free trial of their customer service cloud solution. You get a month to see if it isn’t far better than your current methods of finding and responding to customer queries. This system includes social networks like Facebook and Twitter, as well as traditional email and toll free number contacts. As an integrated solution, everything you need is right there at the operator’s station in one easy to use tool.

Other services, from online meetings to toll free telephone, also offer free trial periods. Watch for free trial opportunities any time you shop online for business services. These are a great way to become confident that you are getting the right service at the right price.

How to Get a Web Presence For Your Business

Are you new in business or wanting to bring your established bricks and mortar business online? Start researching all the options and your head can begin to swim. Is this more trouble than it’s worth?

Oh, not at all. People who have built their online presence will tell you it has been well worth it. Why not make the process much easier and enjoyable with some experienced support? I’d suggest just sitting back and taking a minute to watch this amusing introductory video from Network Solutions...



Well, what do you think? Does it make more sense now? Your task can be made much easier if you get started with a company like Network Solutions that provides one stop shopping for all the elements you need to launch your online presence. You can order your domain name, web hosting package and marketing services on the same site.

In fact, to make it easy for the legion of new businesses that want to go online every year, Network Solutions even has special getting started features integrated into their website to lead you successfully through the process.

Network Solutions has been around for the last 30 years and is highly respected by Internet veterans. Since moving beyond domain name registration, the company has grown to offer a comprehensive set of resources that include domain names of all types, web hosting packages for sites you create yourself or for your WordPress Blog, and easy to build template based websites. They look professional and don’t require buying any software. Just use the online Website Builder Tool.

Ready for something more advanced? Network Solutions offers e-commerce packages with designs that are compatible with Dreamweaver, FrontPage and Photoshop software. The price depends on how many products you want to place in your store, from a maximum of 25 right on up to 100,000. Is that a bit intimidating? No problem. Network Solutions offers complete design services where they’ll build a store to your specifications.

If viewing this video and considering the possibilities has you salivating for your own online presence, perhaps with e-commerce options, check out the latest deals from Network Solutions Take advantage while this special is available.

The Rush To Cloud Service Data Centers

There’s a major migration afoot. It’s a move, almost a stampede, from in-house server rooms to public data centers worldwide. Let’s take a look at what this trend is all about and where it may be leading.

The original reason for companies to consider data center colocation was cost savings. The tradeoff is fairly simple. Instead of your organization building and operating its own data center, you ship your servers, switches, routers and network appliances off to a colo facility. That facility offers cost savings through economy of scale. Instead of each business having to come up with environmentally controlled real estate, fire suppression, backup generator power and high bandwidth connectivity, the larger colocation company provides these facilities for hundreds or thousands of customers.

A colo or “carrier hotel”, as they were originally called when the main customers were competitive local exchange carriers, can provide the 24/7 technical staffing that you may not be able to afford. They’ve expanded their suite of services to rent not just rack and cage space, but servers themselves. You no longer have to buy and ship your own equipment. You can rent what you need and have it all set up for you. Even ongoing maintenance can be outsourced to the colo so that your only responsible for the applications you are running.

There is a blending of missions between colocation data centers and hosting companies. The colocation centers have become hosts with the addition of dedicated servers and even virtual servers.

The latest trend in IT is cloud computing and this is where colocation data centers are headed. One good example is PAETEC, a competitive telecom carrier with a national service footprint. PAETEC is known for it’s voice and data services that include T1 lines, DS3, SIP trunking, MPLS networks, OCx fiber optic bandwidth, and Ethernet over copper and fiber connections. Now PAETEC is on a major building spree to nearly triple its 7 data centers spread across the country.

What’s prompting this expansion? It’s all about the cloud. Corporate America has discovered cloud services as a way to control costs, increase flexibility and avoid sometimes unavailable capital investments in infrastructure. The idea of the cloud is very much like the concept of the colocation center with some capability expansions. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows you to rent all the servers and their related facilities that you need. The difference is that the architecture of the cloud is about making it easy to add and subtract resources rapidly. You can do that when servers are virtual and there are massive amounts of networked disk storage to draw from.

PAETEC is offering cloud-based products in their data centers that include dedicated servers, virtual servers, managed storage on demand and more. Hosted Exchange gives companies a Microsoft Exchange E-Mail server with PAETEC technicians and engineers available for support.

Is it time for your company to consider a move to the cloud or relocation to a colocation center to reduce costs and gain access to more resources as needed? If so, get pricing and availability of Cloud and Colocation Data Center Services near your location.



Note: Photo of clouds and building courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.