Data Science Toolkit is a very original resource which provides free access to various valuable data like:

• street address to coordinates
• ip address to coordinates
• file to text (converts PDFs, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets to text)
• and much more.

These data can be reached via the API provided or every part of it is offered as a ready-to-install VM (virtual machine) where you can install to any server (or locally) for limitless API usage.

The API is REST with JSON results + there are also command line, Python and JavaScript interfaces.

Also, besides the VM, an EC2 AMI is ready for instant deployment to the Amazon's cloud.

libcloud is a standard client library, written in Python, to access popular cloud hosting providers.

Using cloud services without the need to learn APIs for each of them & building web applications that use multiple providers become much easier.

libcloud currently supports ~8 cloud hosting providers including Amazon EC2, Slicehost & Rackspace.

It would be lovely to see similar libraries built for other scripting languages which will make the lives of developer easier.

Cloud hosting, storage & content delivery networks (CDNs) are very popular services for the last few years, which is very normal, as they offer a series of advantages in running + serving web applications.

An application hosted in the cloud will:

• easily scale (with instantly deployable & API controlled instances, unlimited diskspaces, etc..)
• serve files faster with content delivery network (CDN) support
• have a better availability (with strong SLAs)

With the increasing number of providers & tools created, cloud hosting is getting simpler & simpler everyday.

Getting in the cloud, in most cases, will save so much time & resources when running a growing web application. You won't need to think of the hardware, better react to the system resources & bandwidth usage fluctuations, pay exactly for what you use & much more.

Here is a collection of popular options & tools that can help you in hosting your applications in the cloud:

Cloud Hosting & Storage Options

Rackspace Cloud

Cloud Servers – (hosting)

The service provides instantly deployable servers with a choice of popular Linux distributions (no Windows). Currently, there is no API support but it is on the way.

Cloud Files – (storage)

A redundant data storage service which replicates the data in 3 seperate locations.

Files can be managed from a web-based interface or an API. The system is integrated with LimeLight content delivery network & files can be selected to be served faster via this network.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – (hosting)

Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides you the environment to instantly launch (or remove) new servers (instances) with the OS & configuration you need which makes scaling of a web application much easier.

This functionality can be controlled via the web service APIs or tools to be mentioned in this post.

You are charged with the resources consumed like hours your servers (instances) work or the bandwidth used.

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