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More and more companies are moving from traditional servers to virtual servers in the cloud, and many new service-based deployments are starting in the cloud. However, despite the overwhelming popularity of the cloud here, deployments in the cloud look a lot like deployments on traditional servers. Companies are not changing their systems architecture to take advantage of some of the unique aspects of being in the cloud.

The key difference between remotely-hosted, virtualized, on-demand-by-API servers (the definition of the “cloud” for this post) and any other hardware-based deployment (e.g., dedicated, co-located, or not-on-demand-by-API virtualized servers) is that servers are software on the cloud.

Software applications traditionally differ from server environments in several key ways:

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor says buying servers was a mistake. A very big mistake. At the time, he was chief executive at FriendFeed, which eventually was sold to Facebook for the tidy sum of a reported $50 million. But these were the early days. He and his team needed to decide between buying servers or using Amazon Web Services. They bought the servers.

Five years ago, Steve Huffman was another young entrepreneurial mind chomping at the bit to launch his very own startup. After taking a train from Virginia to Boston to see Paul Graham speak at Harvard in 2005, Huffman and his partner Alexis Ohanian eventually joined the very first class of Y Combinator. Later that summer, Reddit was born. Now, in 2010, Huffman is taking a stab at his second startup, Hipmunk, and today I had the chance to chat with him about what he has learned from the last five years and why launching his latest project "terrified" him.

Whether we are biting off more than we chew or our eyes are too big for our stomachs, we as humans often find ourselves underestimating the total of the requirements to complete a specific goal. In startup culture, this kind of mistake can be fatal to a young business, so before you find yourself unexpectedly overwhelmed, make sure you investigate the different ways to make life easier on your fledgling company. One of the largest headaches that comes with launching a Web startup is managing servers and ensuring the smooth sailing of the back-end, and RoundHouse - a brand new managed server support solution - wants to take these worries away for startups.

The technology landscape is shifting. With the rise of cloud computing, there has been a renewed focus on what's happening in the datacenter. But it's not just consumer-grade web apps that are driving this shift - enterprises, too, are looking to virtualize their services and move applications off the desktop in order to better manage client computers and maintain data security.

Recently, HP and research firm IDC took a look at some of the biggest trends they're seeing in the datacenter. These five hot new trends are having a big impact on computing today and the future of the cloud. But which ones are most important?