Publicly hosting your FileMaker solution makes it possible for you (or a webservice like AWS S3, Twilio or eBay) to communicate with your FileMaker data from anywhere with an internet connection. This is typically referred to as having a “cloud server” or having your data “on the cloud.” To get your solution up to the cloud, Mandelbrot uses Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (aka AWS EC2). AWS EC2 is the world’s largest, fastest, most secure and cost effective way of hosting your FileMaker Server publicly.
Speed + Connectivity
Logging into FileMaker from a laptop, iPad or iPhone from your local café is more appealing now than it ever has been. It’s fantastic to be able to work from anywhere, especially when you’ve got a robust FileMaker solution that keeps you from needing a dozen utility applications (excel, word, outlook, etc) to do your work. But what about all those outside services that want to trade data with your solution?
Modern applications depend on APIs, which translate information between programs and let them talk directly to each other. When your server’s on your local network only, you’re going to have a hard time communicating in both directions. Instead, putting your server on AWS EC2 not only makes it possible to communicate both ways, it makes it blazing fast. If the internet is the information superhighway, then AWS EC2 is 500 lanes wide. AWS data centers are woven directly into the backbone of the internet. Chances are, what you’re reading now has been passed through at least one of them on it’s way to you.
Security
You wouldn’t keep all of your money in a shoebox when there’s a really great bank just around the corner. Professionally configured and managed AWS cloud hosting is actually far more secure than storing your data locally. In AWS’s modern, purpose built data centers, you don’t have to deal with:
- Climate control
- Power and internet outages
- Local network attacks (man in the middle, warhacking)
- Physical theft or damage
- Hardware failure
With AWS EC2 and a professional installation from a leading FileMaker hosting guru, you also get the most up to date firewalls, which deny malicious or unwanted traffic to your server. We can restrict the firewall to specific IP addresses, add VPNs or DMZ’s to make your solution a fortress.
Backups
We also create daily snapshots of your server’s files, which we store in your AWS account’s Glacier Deep Archive storage. Archive’s got the cheapest storage price: $1 per terabyte per month. Once your backups are there, it’s usually not worth ever really deleting them. We back up to a different region in case of a natural disaster- if you’re in New York, we back you up in Oregon.
No Hardware to Maintain
My personal favorite part of AWS EC2 is that you can build a server without hardware. You select the size of the server, how much CPU, storage, RAM, etc and you’ve got a machine in a few minutes. If you need to test something new, you don’t have to risk your existing hardware or configuration to do it. Instead, just spin up a new server and pay only for the time you use it. If you want to, you pay ahead for 3 years at a time and save 30-40%. You can even switch servers in the middle of the 3 years and keep the discount.
Cost
Another misconception is that running a cloud server that charges you by the minute is much more expensive. It isn’t much different.
3 year cost of on-premises server:
- 2 core, 8GB RAM Physical Server- $500/yr
- Power supply (battery backup) – $50/yr
- Local backup External HDD – $25/yr
- Carbonite online backup service – $80/yr
- New Firewall – $90/yr
- Windows Server 2019 – $100/yr
- Total 3 year cost: $2,535
3 year cost of AWS EC2 based server:
- Reserved T2.large EC2 instance (2 core, 8GB RAM) – $515/yr
- 100GB attached EBS volume of SSD storage – $120/yr
- 250GB of AWS S3 storage in another region for backups – $69/yr
- Local backup External HDD – $25/yr
- Total 3 year cost: $2,187
Included at not additional cost by AWS EC2
- Windows Server 2019
- 24/7 physical security
- Water-free fire suppression
- Climate control
- Windows Server 2019
- Extra bandwidth (your data is already online)
So how does Mandebrot LLC charge for hosting?
We typically charge a one time setup fee per server. Once you’re up, we bill hourly for any administration or config. Contact us here to get started.
If you want to set up your own, check out this installation guide we published as well.