For me WordPress designers and developers should go for Cloud computing, because it is an emerging technology. They are often in the business of selling ideas which is not a physical product so they don’t actually have to be anywhere when they work. They just need to be near a computer with an internet connection.
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Compared to the traditional shared, VPS or dedicated hosting , cloud hosting offers unprecedented benefits that makes your design and development grow as you can concentrate on your core designing rather than worrying about the hardware software requirements.
Optimizing your WordPress installation for cloud computing
Optimization is very important to run a successful WordPress powered website or blog. On shared hosting no need to pay much attention to how much server resources your WordPress installation utilizes. As well dedicated hosting or virtual private servers can eat up ram and utilize a lots of resources. However, on a cloud computing environment like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), give you the edge that only utilized resources will be use.
On the other hand, you should optimize your WordPress installation and use some plugins which help you to minimize resources it uses. Here are some useful plugins.
Amazon Cloud Computing S3 plugin for WordPress
This WordPress plugin allows you to use Amazon’s Simple Storage Service to host your media for your WordPress powered blog.
Thanks to Tan Tan Noodles Blog, online storage solution and host their images for providing valuable tips about using Amazon S3.
Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress
Author: Arne Brachhold
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
Resize on Upload
Author: John Tindell
Provides the ability to set a maximum width or height an uploaded image can be, if the image is larger than the specified values then it resized. Ideal for users who wish to upload multiple files without having to resize them via Photoshop or GIMP first.
Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Author: mitcho (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine)
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.
A Better Tag Cloud
Author: Nicolas Kuttler
I was pretty annoyed with the default tag cloud widget. It does a lot of things wrong, like inconsistent HTML markup and hardcoded font sizes. So I wanted to write my own. Digging through the code I found out that the wordpress wp_tag_cloud() function is pretty powerful. In fact, it could do almost everyhing I want. So I abandoned my plan to rewrite everything from scratch and added a nice admin interface to my tag cloud widget.
Google Analytics for WordPress
Author: Joost de Valk
The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily and with lots of metadata. It adds the asynchronous tracking code for Google Analytics and automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It’ll add custom variables while tracking to show you pageviews per author, post type, category or publication year. It’ll also allow you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, ignore certain user levels, and much much more: this is simply the Ultimate Google Analytic solution for WP!
Download | Plugin Homepage
These are the links contain more useful plugin list:
30+ Essential WordPress Plugins
The Best WordPress Plugins for Bloggers of the Future
Cloud Website Builders
The following websites allow anybody to create a blog.
- Blogger
Blogger is a website that allows anybody to create their own blog for free. - Google Sites
Google sites allows anybody to easily build a public website or private intranet with advanced functionality. Even quite sophisticated sites can be built and hosted with no payment required. - Moonfruit
Moonfruit is a very easy to use, drag-and-drop website building tool that has already been used to build over 2.5 million websites. A site with up to 15 pages can be built and hosted for free. After that a subscription becomes payable. - Webs.com
Webs is a free or paid website building tool that offers more code-savvy website designers somewhat greater technical flexibility that most of its competitors. - WordPress
Wordpress is a very popular and sophisticated tool for creating your own free or paid blogging website.
Photo, Video and Audio Editors
These are all free online media editing tools.
- Aviary
Aviary offers suite of online media editing tools, including its Phoenix photo editor, Ravenvector-based drawing package (a bit like an online version of Adobe Illustrator), and its Mynamulti-track audio editor. - FotoFlexer
Fotoflexer is a popular online photo editor that includes great integration with Facebook, Flickrand MySpace. - flauntR
flauntR is an online photo editing package that can integrate with a range of other popular web applications that use photos. - Jaycut
Jaycut is a free online video editor. It allows twin-track video editing with transitions and titles, and has direct YouTube upload functionality. A demo can even be tried immediately without registration! This really is cutting-edge cloud software as its most impressive. - Photoshop Express
Photoshop express is a free if very-cut-down online version of the industry-standard PhotoShop photo editor. - Picnik
Picnik is an online photoeditor that can be used for free without registration. It is a cheery package for those who want clear and simple tools. - Pixlr
Pixlr is an absolutely excellent free online photo editor. An interface called Pixlr Express is provided for image editing novices. However, for those who have experience of the full version of PhotoShop, the full Pixlr Editor offers a very powerful range of tools. These include layers, a history brush, and wide range of real-time filters. Anybody can use Pixlr for free online without even registering. Hurrah! However, online file storage is not included. - Pixorial.com
Pixorial is another online video editor. Whilst not as sophisticated as Jaycut, it includes some cool collaborative features.
Cloud E-Mail Packages
Allow e-mail to be written and collected in the cloud.
- Gmail
Gmail is the very popular free web-based e-mail offering from Google. - Mimecast
Mimecast is a cloud-based e-mail system for businesses that offers enterprise-class security and archiving. - Windows Live Hotmail
Windows Live Hotmail is Microsoft’s free online e-mail system. It offers 5Gb of storage that ‘automatically increases as you need it’. - Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! Mail is a free online e-mail system which claims to offer ‘unlimited’ storage.
Virtual Meeting Tools
Following packages all facilitate virtual meetings by allowing remote participants to electronically communicate and share computing resources.
- Adobe ConnectNow
Adobe ConnectNow is a sophisticated online application for running virtual meetings. Users can share files, notes and their entire screens, as well as using online whiteboards and audio or video conferencing. Both free and paid versions are available. - LotusLive Meetings
LotusLive meetings is a paid online virtual meeting tool from IBM, and one element of the broader LotusLive online collaboration suite. - WebEx
WebEx is a suite of online collaboration tools from Internet giant Cisco. It features file and desktop sharing combined with phone conferencing and video conferencing and is becoming an industry standard. Whilst WebEx is a paid service, a free trial is available.
Freemium SaaS WordPress CMS + Blog Theme I
Freemium SaaS I for WordPress is a theme created for you to market your SaaS (Software as a Service) Web application. This WordPress theme includes the following:
- WordPress 3.0 Compatible
- 23 useful shortcodes
- 6 admin switchable color schemes
- Editable 3, 4 or 5 Column Pricing Grid (as static blocks)
- Product Tour Pages Template
- Billing info & Credit Card Signup Form (must be integrated with your own gateway)
- Detailed Setup Instructions
- Sample content to get your site looking like our demo
- 6 Page Templates
- 4 Panel Theme Settings Admin
- Localization support
Includes layered Photoshop PSD (Photoshop) file of entire site.
Freemium SaaS WordPress CMS + Blog Theme II
Freemium SaaS II for WordPress is a theme created for you to market your SaaS (Software as a Service) Web application. This WordPress theme includes the following:
- WordPress 3.0 Compatible
- 21 useful shortcodes
- Editable 3, 4 or 5 Column Pricing Grid (as static blocks)
- Product Tour Pages Template
- Billing info & Credit Card Signup Form (must be integrated with your own gateway)
- Detailed Instructions Documentation
- 6 Page Templates
- Custom 4-panel Admin Settings
Includes layered Photoshop PSD (Photoshop) file of entire site.
If you want to understand more about Cloud Computing than you must read this book:
Cloud Computing: Web-Based Applications That Change the Way You Work and Collaborate Online.