Cloud technology has been one of the most widely accepted and widely used computing technologies of the last decade. Although its core is based on network based computing adopted in 1960s, in the last 11 years, the concept of Cloud Computing has been explored much further and retrofitted in most IT solutions for higher throughput and scalability.
Given its array of advantages, Cloud based solutions are used for hosting environments, as well. If one is to quickly understand the concept of Cloud Hosting, it works on the Principle of ‘Divide and Rule’, where the resources needed to run your website are divided across multiple machines across the network and rendered as per the need.
Many people ask, why the division? How does this help? In this post, we will talk about 3 situations where Cloud Hosting wins.
Down Times are Just Unacceptable: Your business website has a lot of online transactions. Let’s say you are an eCommerce portal, or a booking engine or a Stock Trading platform. where every second of down time not only costs $$ but also shatters your reputation among your trusted user base. Here, you have to ensure website stays up and going.
But what happens if there is a hardware failure at your hosting infrastructure? Or any other kind of data corruption? This is a serious threat to your website’s uptime and continuity. This problem is taken care of by the Cloud as your resources are spread across multiple machines on the cloud network so if one fails, the other is already present to support.
There is also data mirroring which a lot of hosting providers offer, for instance ResellerClub, my Cloud Hosting Provider offers data mirroring which allows mirroring across 3 distinct devices on multiple drives and cabinets to ensure seamless transition in the event of any hardware issues.
Handling Unexpected or Un-Planned Traffic Surges: Do you Remember what happened with Flipkart’s (Indian eCommerce giant) Big Billion Day sale? Well with their one day flash sale, they garnered over $100 million in 10 hours, but the number could have been even more, had their server not failed because it could not handle the peaking traffic.
Well if the hosting resources and servers are not equipped to handle incoming traffic surges and peaks, this is bound to happen. In a traditional hosting environment such as Shared or Dedicated Hosting, seamless scale-up of infrastructure and hosting resources needs to be scoped and planned. But when it comes to Cloud Hosting, instantaneous allocation of resources with the emerging needs of the website extremely easy because of the very nature of the arrangement.
Balance Cost to Throughput: For any growing business website, hosting requirements need to be planned. When you realize that Shared Hosting is just not providing enough; traditional measures go to Dedicated Hosting as the logical next step. But in this arrangement, it could be possible that you may need to unnecessarily take-up capital expenditure for dedicated infrastructure but not even use it to its full capacity. This cost can be easily minimized in a Cloud Hosting environment. You may just need to pay for the resources/services which you actually utilize, without limiting scalability.
Having said that, Cloud Hosting definitely helps in these situations, but it is very essential that you perform a thorough audit of your existing systems. Do a fair amount of number crunching of your current server stats and based on historic trends and potential future business growth, make a calculated decision to move to Cloud Hosting. Also, audit the Cloud Hosting provider thoroughly, scrutinize their plans and ensure they take care of your business needs in the best possible manner.
Hope this helps and please be feel free to share your thoughts and comments in the section bellow.
