The benefits of Cloud Hosting

On any given day in IT, the word “Cloud” probably gets uttered, but so many IT Managers jump into it without having a full understanding of how it can benefit your business and what the downsides maybe vs a traditional approach. At Dev Team Solutions Limited we are experts in all methods of hosting and can help you as a business decide the right way for the best value and return on investment.

What is Cloud Hosting

Think of Cloud Hosting as a massively configurable server.  Let’s say you host a website.  A website gets hosted on a server.  A server is just really an ultra-powerful computer which is generally ultra-reliable and built for a purpose.  You have been running your website for a few months and suddenly you get a form of recognition maybe in a newspaper or article.  This unexpectedly brings you 10 times the amount of web traffic.  You only paid for what you needed at the time, so your website crashes because it can’t cope with the load.  Not good, lost custom and lost reputation.  With a fixed server sat in a data centre, you are limited by the hardware it runs on.  With cloud hosting your server is a virtual piece of hardware which shares resources across many physical servers, often if different geographical locations.  So in the cloud environment you can just say, ok, today I have more traffic, lets increase the server memory and processor power (generally requires a reboot).  Ok sowe have to pay more now for our server as it’s more powerful, but we’ve not had to purchase any additional hardware or so anything other than change the servers details in our cloud hosting control panel.  If next week the servers not busy, you can re configure it again to be less powerful and save the business some money.  Sound good so far?

Cloud hosting providers

There are 3 main providers, although many more exist.  Amazon was one of the first, Microsoft with its Azure platform, and Rackspace.

There are many differences between each cloud provider, we have used them all and can assist you with your businesses setup.  Each provider has a different control panel, with a different way of setting up security and the servers themselves.  Microsoft has been the cheaper of the three, but there are price battles between them all so this fluctuates.

They all offer additional options for the servers such as hosting SQL Server which is supplied at an additional cost.

Advantages

  • Fire up a new server when ever you want
  • Choice of operating system
  • Re configurable, sometimes on the fly to increase or decrease memory, disk space and performance
  • Performance – Our dedicated servers often perform 10x better than a similar specified cloud server when it comes to disk transfer rates with products such as SQL Server.
  • Pretty nifty load balancing and firewall like security features
  • Almost unlimited disk space and memory as long as you can afford it.
  • Backup Services are generally very good
  • No hardware to purchase and worry about replacing
  • Geolocated data – You can choose to host the data across multiple countries to spread the risk of data loss

Disadvantages

  • Cost – Traditional Hosting and even your own rack in a data centre can be cheaper per month, although you need to factor in replacing hardware etc if you are planning on owning your own servers
  • Unexpected reboots and maintenance windows – We find this so annoying that both Amazon and Microsoft have maintenance jobs which require reboots of your servers and sometimes some downtime which often isn’t timed well for UK traffic. Hardware faults can still occur.  One example of which was a failure on Amazon where we got notified that the server was sitting on corrupt hardware and it was being shut down permanently by Amazon.  We had a mild panic and had to work out a way of moving all the data to a new instance before the deadline which was only a short time away.
  • Experience – Even if you had someone experienced in servers, you will require someone that knows the control panels for each of the platforms – We can assist with this
  • Most sites don’t require the level of flexibility even enterprise level sites
  • Unexpected bills – sometimes much higher than you had thought. One example, one of our clients was being billed by Amazon for over £900 a month for one basic server with SQL Server and minimal traffic.
  • Performance – Our dedicated servers often perform 10x better than a similar specified cloud server when it comes to disk transfer rates with products such as SQL Server.

Hybrid

We can assist you with your own servers, dedicated, or cloud based and can recommend the best for your business for your budget.  We also offer our own hosting which takes in the advantages of cloud hosting, but with less of the disadvantages.  Our servers are dedicated work horses, ultra modern and powerful.  We can configure a virtual server for you with all the benefits of cloud hosting, but we take care of the hardware and the setup.

Whatever your hosting requirements, talk to us today and use our experience to make the right decision whichever platform or host you choose.