CLOUD HOSTING

WHAT IS CLOUD HOSTING?

Cloud hosting has quickly become one of the most popular and widely used hosting types in recent years. Unlike shared and dedicated hosting where everything that’s needed to host your website or applications is housed in one server stack, cloud hosting uses innovative technology to spread files, data, resources, bandwidth, and computing operations among multiple remote servers that are networked to act together. And since your applications do not rely on a single server, but instead a network of servers, this network of servers is referred to as the cloud. The distributed solution eliminates any single point of failure, provides redundant data storage, and guarantees exclusive use of server resources like processing and memory.

With cloud hosting, you rely on a unique server configuration that lets you pull from multiple different servers, which results in an affordable hosting solution that’s also scalable and incredibly reliable. A good example would be a network of virtual servers that tap into an underlying network of physical servers. The extent to which you tap into this network depends upon the actual needs of the application and can be scaled up or down accordingly.

WHEN AND WHY CHOOSE CLOUD HOSTING?

Here’s is a theoretical scenario where Cloud Hosting would make sense:

You are a small, medium to large-sized business/company that receives a high volume of traffic. The visitors to your site expect a high-performance site that loads quickly and operates appropriately. Dealing with downtime just isn’t an option for you and you don’t want to worry about the issues that could potentially arise when sharing resources with other sites. Any downtime would be a huge setback for your business because it would squander leads, hurt sales and potentially damage your reputation.

You understand the threat a disaster could bring and believe in taking preventive measures. Disasters are unpredictable and you want to reinstate your service after disruption in case of unforeseen disruptions. You have a huge need for reliability and want to have access to multiple servers in the event that a disaster occurs. Business continuity is essential to your business.

There’s also a possibility that you’ll need to scale up in the future as you continue to build your brand and generate more traffic. As a result, you want the option to instantly scale CPU and RAM resources.

Security is another one of your concerns. From physical/operational, network and system, and application and data security options. You can’t risk sensitive data winding up in the wrong hands and cyber-attack would temporarily cripple your cloud operations. Sensitive data: you work with sensitive data and may consider separating data at the hardware level, using dedicated servers or other options. Your head should be in the cloud!!

You also want to free up an additional budget of on-premise servers(bought and rented), employees, and general resources needed to host and run your applications and you don’t mind spending more for all the benefits that come with cloud hosting.

Support: You are drawn to tools and some specialist services to help you manage the cloud-hosted environment and help you resolve cloud issues that you face from time to time.

You know that technology can be deceptive and having a good backup facility is a must. You need to backup processes and determine how frequently accessed data can be backed up.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF CLOUD HOSTING?

• Flexibility and ease to scale: Traditional hosting services offer limited bandwidth. Cloud hosting scales to accommodate traffic spikes or seasonal demands.
• Pay—as—you—go—model: Users only pay for the resources of the user by the hour or month. This differs from the flat rates of traditional hosting.
• Reliability: Hardware failures do not cause downtime because sites and applications are hosted on a network of servers. Traffic travels across separate network interfaces, where it is segregated and secured. Because of the multiple servers used simultaneously in a cloud environment, your application/site enjoys optimal functionality at all times.
• High uptime and availability: With a promise of a 99.99% uptime SLA, both DO and GCP guarantee high levels of availability. Resources span multiple zones and regions to avert any possibility of failure during disasters. In terms of performance, it’s hard to beat cloud hosting as dynamic requests are processed with consistently fast load times. This makes it ideal for websites that receive a high volume of traffic.
• Speedy server setup process: With cloud hosting, deploying cloud servers is very quick with the servers being available within seconds of launch.
• High security: Cloud hosting provides several options to configure security to your servers and general access to your cloud environment. There are security protocols to protect databases and applications against common threats such as malware, denial of service, and cross-scripting.
• Safety from server hardware failure: With cloud hosting your site is isolated from any physical server issues including hacking, hardware failure, or system overload. In the event of an underlying hardware failure, you can easily move your server to a different healthy host.

CONCLUSION

Cloud hosting provides the options and advantages of quicker solution deployment and lower cost of implementation and operations. It is not only quicker to deploy on the cloud, but it also ensures the scalability, availability, and performance needs of the deployment.

Cloud hosting thus remains to be a prominent deployment option for clients of all industries. If you are not already there, now is a perfect time to consider it a strategic option and get on board with cloud hosting.