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When it comes to technology professionals, topics tend to dissolve into the equivalent of existential religious debate. Windows or Linux … Mac or PC … hosting or cloud … Android or iOS … and inevitably, commercial software or open-source? But that’s changing. Because in the long run, the only thing the market wants and the only thing that businesses want if for the technology to work, run fast, be secure, and be easy to use … and even a little entertaining if we can get away with it.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was adopted by central EU governmental authorities to augment and supersede the previous Data Protection Directive which came into effect in 1995. Chances are, if you are doing business in the EU and your website was created by a professional development team, your website likely follows many of those recommendations already. Importantly, the guidelines of the Data Protection Directive were just that – a set of guidelines.

We still get asked this question all the time. Once we have helped a customer build their application or website, they want our advice on where they should they put it. It’s a great question, because the “right” answer has changed over time as project requirements and hosting technologies have changed. And even today the answer can be different depending on your individual business needs and the industry that you are in. So, let’s start with a brief overview of the differences between the four broad categories of application and website hosting and then drill down to discover what our go-to recommendation is for most businesses today.

If everything we knew about hackers, ransomware, identity theft, and website security was limited to reports from the major media, no one would ever build a website again. Yes, the internet landscape has its dangers. But the truth of the matter is that the real risk to the vast majority of the websites out there is that they have not been well-maintained, are out of date, or have not implemented basic security measures.

The internet is all about the disruption of established business models. But that disruption is not limited to virtual vs bricks-and-mortar businesses. Sometimes – often – internet and web technologies disrupt themselves.

In a previous blog post we mentioned Microsoft Azure’s latest announcements for what they call “Azure Functions.” It’s a part of their approach to the trend toward “serverless computing” — a concept taking the place of “big data” as the hot-button topic in internet development circles these days.