TechNayak(mirror)

You may think building a web property needs not just code but scalable hardware, but you will be surprised to know you don’t need anything but a browser. Thanks to hosted infrastructure you can run and control your online business from the realms of a browser. Even the former, code, is something that is sparingly used in today’s businesses. That’s the flexibility the web offers.

Lets see some specifics and understand what I am really talking about. You will say the first thing a web based venture needs are servers and collocation centres, WRONG!! You have EC2 for computing, or EDGE grids, S3 or other similar services for storage and even if you do require the pleasures of your own server, try one of the virtualization technologies of the web hosts. That should just about cover your hardware part of things, except if you are trying to break the record for calculating largest number of decimals found in Pi ( which stands frighteningly close to a trillion digits when I last checked).

Now comes the software part of things. Most web businesses thrive on prebuilt, read to deploy open source software. Be it blogs, wikis, forums, bug tracking tools, there is always an open source software for whatever that is that you want to do. What’s even better, is that some of these software’s are self hosted and all you need is to include some paths and you are up and running with the latest and most stable version of the software. The advantage with this scheme is that you don’t need to manually upgrade your installations; they are done by the provider.

Supposing you do require the luxury of your own server, then invest in one of the upcoming virtualization technologies provided by many top hosts. They give you shell access and the comforts of your own server complete with install privileges and best of all, you don’t maintain it.

So since the hardware and software parts of the company are done, all you have to do is think of an innovative idea and get the ball rolling.