Providing excellent value for money, "cloud computing" services, also known as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), are database and application platforms available via online services such as Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure. Systems Xpert can migrate your existing applications or develop custom applications to take advantage of these "bleeding-edge" technologies.

Systems Xpert does not charge any additional agency fees on top of the cloud platform provider charges. We set you up with your own accounts and you deal with the provider directly.

Systems Xpert can develop or migrate applications for AWS. We primarily use the Relational Database Service (RDS), Simple Notification Service (SNS), Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Simple Storage Service (S3) to provide extremely reliable and highly available internet applications.

If you require truly global always-available internet application hosting, we can also set up your internet applications on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) platform, providing virtual machines that are geographically distributed and disaster resilient.

AWS is charged on data transfer usage.

The Google App Engine is a cheap and effective way to develop and host Web applications. Systems Xpert can develop applications on this platform in the Java and Python languages.

Google's App Engine is probably the most cost-effective way to take advantage of cloud computing. Their website states:

"App Engine costs nothing to get started. All applications can use up to 500 MB of storage and enough CPU and bandwidth to support an efficient app serving around 5 million page views a month, absolutely free. When you enable billing for your application, your free limits are raised, and you only pay for resources you use above the free levels."

For internet applications that take advantage of Microsoft's .NET platform and their SQL Server database system in the cloud, Microsoft have recently launched Microsoft Azure. Converting existing .NET applications to Azure is a relatively quick and easy process and can save a lot of money on SQL Server and other Microsoft application licenses.

Pricing for the Azure platform is quite complex and is explained on their Web site.