Cloud hosting is basically hosting that uses a system of servers to deliver your hosting service. Ordinary “non-cloud” servers use a single server or a virtual server to deliver service and thus have a single point of failure.
Before you sign up with another hosting provider, consider five important benefits of going with a cloud service.
1. Increased Flexibility in Your Company
Because a cloud server can be ready to go in minutes, rather than weeks or months as with a traditional server, you can speed up the time it takes to get your project off the ground and finished. Don’t underestimate this benefit.
Calculate what it would cost you to pay your department heads another three months’ worth of salary without having any additional revenue from the completed project rolling in.
2. Instant Scalability
Because cloud servers don’t have a single point of failure, they also have instant scalability. Servers can often be created and destroyed “on demand,” meaning your business can scale up or down as needed without having to hire dedicated IT staff, to build and then take down your servers.
This saves you time, and money, as well as headaches in getting your business off the ground. It’s also helpful when you’re winding down a project and you don’t need the same amount of resources that you did at its peak.
You can simply destroy the cloud server and only pay for what you’re actually using – no licensing by the year and no contract commitments.
3. Less Operational Issues
The resellers are advocates for major cloud hosting companies that all have one thing in common – standardization. When you use standardized services, you reduce your IT costs, your overhead costs, and your ongoing operational costs.
Cloud computing allows you to deploy the same service of topology of services repetitively – you effectively clone your existing resources with pre-built server images, application services, and application landscapes using a sort of template from the original server setup.
4. Better Use of Resources
Sometimes, qualitative values are hard to define quantitatively. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, however. On the contrary, by going with cloud-based servers, you’re increasing the productivity of the staff. How?
Because the staff doesn’t have the same types of problems with cloud systems that they own with traditional IT setups. For example, rather than deal with downtime problems that affect the entire company, departments may be affected individually or not at all because the cloud server is distributed so everyone isn’t relying on the same server for their needs.
Finally, there’s the issue of configuration within your IT department. With cloud-based systems, all that’s often needed is a few clicks and a new server is set up. Compare this with the previous model, where it took days, weeks, and even months to scale up a business’s servers.
Ultimately, your IT team can spend their days doing something more important, like maintaining your automated marketing system, fixing actual glitches in the server, and optimizing everything for your needs.
5. Lower Capital Outlay
There tends to be a lower cost of capital associated with cloud servers. Why? Because there’s no upfront cost associated with starting them, relatively speaking. Instead of having to buy a server and spend a lot of money up front for installation and configuration, you simply buy the resources you need from the virtual provider and then deploy the servers virtually.
There’s some debate over the long-term benefits of doing this, but think of it this way: all servers eventually die. What position do you want your company to be in? A position where you’re paying monthly for a service that never fails or paying an upfront cost, eliminating monthly costs, but subjecting yourself to instantaneous server death at any moment?
