It’s been around for more than a decade. You probably hear about it in tech promotion commercials or in news articles.
The cloud.
But what is the cloud and what are the benefits to my website?
Cloud computing enables organizations to consume a combination of resources, such as a virtual machine (server), application (software) or storage capacity (drives) as a utility rather than having to build and maintain computing infrastructures in-house. Thus, it is a service of resources you rent from cloud providers such as Google, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azure.
Why the cloud over my hosting company?
Scalable Solutions
Traditional web hosting companies provide slick marketing web hosting packages promising speed and performance. A closer look after the purchase reveals you got the bare minimum of computing power for your website. Sure, your website might load quickly but throw in half dozen users looking at your website at the same time your website performance quickly starts to crawl. Hosting providers quick to scramble and provide third-party “cloud site mirroring” tools only to create more headaches with websites that have regular content changes.
Also, note if you have email accounts with your hosting provider each device and each email account count towards one process. i.e. 2 email accounts & 3 devices (desktop, tablet, smartphone) = 6 processes. Most mid-tier hosting packages have a limit of 20 processes, so you might be eating almost a third of your processing allocation in email alone. Ouch.
The cloud was designed as a scalable solution to computing demands. As your company grows so will its internet traffic to the website. Having your website hosted in the cloud can effortlessly change resources as business web traffic demands change.
Dedicated Resources
All traditional hosting providers provide what’s called “shared hosting”. Meaning your website is placed on a server with hundreds to thousands of other websites and your website’s performance and speed is dependent on the other websites running at that moment. If not managed properly a couple of bad apples can bring a web hosting server to its knees when it comes to performance.
Defining a virtual machine in the cloud your website is given pre-set defined resources that no-one else can use thus resources are available when the demand occurs.
Security Concerns
The cloud-like anything else exposed on the internet is vulnerable to cyber-attacks but with localized dedicated resources such as virtual machines, the likelihood of a breach is minimal over traditional shared hosting providers. Also, these cloud infrastructures are managed by some of the world’s top tech companies so experience and proactive approaches to cyber-security.
Pay for what you use
As mentioned the use of cloud is like a utility. The more consumed the more you will pay. Cloud-based providers have estimation calculators to determine the monthly costs based on the type of resources you will be dedicating to your website. For small companies, it’s high-performance website hosting for a small fee. For larger organizations its leveraging resources without the expense of building their own infrastructure and dedicated staff to maintain it.
Have thoughts or questions about placing your website in the cloud?
Success Media Services can help you make the right decision when it relates to website hosting needs.
Contact us today and we can take a look at your specific needs in website/email hosting, website design, digital marketing, and video production.