No More Art Notepad

You may have heard of Co Working Belfast. Co Working is a concept that’s been successfully piloted in many cities the world over and now Belfast has its equivalent. What it’s lacked for a long time is a premises but it seems that the search is at an end.

I’ll let Andy and David have the fanfare and make the big announcement in the coming weeks but in the meantime here’s a taster of what’s in store…

Coworking Viewing from Andy McMillan on Vimeo.

It’s a big week of change down here in the No More Art HQ. Anyone who knows us knows that we’ve always been very committed to the idea of keeping all of our business local including our website hosting. It’s something we’ve been intensely proud of being able to do over the last few years, and we feel like we’ve been able to give our clients a great localised service.

However with the new possibilities presented by cloud computing we’re having a rethink and have just taken the plunge into trying out Amazon Web Services. Within a few minutes we’d created our server in the cloud, and within an hour we had it configured. A few more tweaks and tucks and we’ll be ready to roll out there in the big scary electric cloud of computer land. And to our joy we then realised that our little slice of the cloud exists in a datacentre in Dublin, so not quite in Belfast, but it’s not Dubai!

So far the speed is phenomenal and the costs looks to be excellent also. In fact the costs look to be a fraction of any quote we were able to get from local companies to host our own hardware, maybe that’s something local hosting companies should seek to address.

One thing learnt thus far is don’t shut your server down, it deletes it! Scary moment until you realise you can boot up a new virtual machine in a few minutes and carry on.

Ah cloud computing. Where you been all our life?