As if I didn’t need a lesson on why cloud computing has its advantages …
I spent the last two nights in New York. This morning, I picked up my computer in my hotel room to check my e-mail. (It had been turned on and connected to the Internet all night, but let’s save the energy conservation question for another time.) I noticed that there were no new e-mail messages after 2:30 AM. Not good.
Within a few minutes I had determined that the Internet connection back at my Boston office was fine, but my mail server was not responding. I could guess at some possible causes – a power failure that had led the server to shut itself down, a glitch in one or more of the services on the machine, a sudden defect in a network cable, and so on. All I really knew or cared about was the fact that it was a Monday morning, I had no e-mail server, and I was not going to be back in my office to check the problem in person for another eight hours.
Because I had prepared for this possibility, I was bothered but not panicked. The only thing I really needed access to today was my e-mail. And for the last several years, I’ve been using a cloud-based service for spam and virus protection. This service intercepts all the mail headed for schrag.net, filters out all the garbage, and then sends the good stuff on to my Exchange server.
The cloud-based spam and malware filtering alone is worth the cost of the monthly service. It means neither my server nor my firewall have to spend time doing the filtering on-site, and it also means there’s a lot less Internet traffic going back and forth to my office. But a wonderful side effect is that the service acts as a mail spooler. Instead of having all incoming messages returned to sender when my Exchange server is unavailable, the spooler holds onto the inbound mail temporarily, and lets me retrieve individual messages through a web interface. When my server finally comes back on line, the spooler will deliver all the temporarily held mail, and everything will be back to normal.
There are many cloud-based mail filtering and spooling services out there. I happen to be using one called SpamStopsHere, a service that I also resell to my clients. In (what I hope will be) the near future, I’ll start posting lists of cloud computing vendors in the pages on this site. Meanwhile, anyone running an in-house mail server should be using SOMETHING in the cloud. Simple spooling (without filtering) can be found for about $35 a year. How can you fail to cost-justify that?
