YWAM Information Technology

I have been thinking about base intranet design and have been reading recently about grid computing. The vision of grid computing is to use the internet to make available the computing power, storage and bandwidth that you need when you need it, without tying up $1,000 and $1000's of dollars in servers, storage and special server rooms, and without having to have the staff to keep it all running and up-to-date. That vision is attractive and is still in the future. Today, however, a good part of this vision is already possible...

The web hosting industry is becoming more and more sophisticated and offering increasing amounts of cpu horsepower, storage and bandwidth for less and less money. Many hosting companies now offer hosting deals for less than $100 per year that have enough power to offer 1000's of email accounts, web server, intranet applications, shared documents, databases etc etc.

This opens up the possiblity of having a very simple internal network. The medium sized base of the future could have an internet connected firewall+router+wireless access point appliance without any need for a Linux or Windows Server! I call this "Intranet Lite"!

This of course opens up a new set of benefits and costs. What do you think of these? Is anyone doing Intranet Lite? Can anyone recommend an appliance or appliances that could be bolted together to create this today?