The Benefits of Cloud Hosting

by Startacus Admin

In recent years ‘Cloud Hosting’ has grown into a fresh, new, and highly versatile alternative to some of the more fixed and less flexible web hosting services on the market.

Its success as a service for the 21st century, has underlined and further advanced the capabilities of digital technologies, expanding the range of web functionalities and creating a user experience that is almost unrecognisable from what it was just a handful of years ago.

For those in the position of choosing a web hosting package there’s certainly a lot to think about and each service that you come across will have specific benefits that may appeal to your particular needs.

However, there are a few specific benefits which cloud hosting generally makes available to your digital operation.

Here’s just a flavour of some of the ways it can benefit you whether you’re a startup, or indeed a more established business.

Benefits of Cloud Hosting

Instant Flexibility

Very few websites / apps / platforms are able to accurately forecast the level of traffic they can expect to have at any one time. Most businesses experience peaks and troughs in how busy they are and digital businesses are no different. In fact, the ease of access that people have to digital spaces, and our growing reliance on the internet means that online operations are often more susceptible to such sudden fluctuations in demand.

Traditional web hosting services (such as dedicated servers) can fail to provide the flexibility needed to deal with a sudden surge in traffic. Dramatic increases can have significant consequences for your business, as your site may slow or even crash under the weight of demand and often your provider will penalise heavily for straying beyond the parameters of your package.

The vast capacity of remote servers used in cloud hosting provides a solution to these issues, by instantly and seamlessly meeting your needs and allowing you to take full advantage of peaks in demand, without any untoward consequences.

It is usually cheaper

Many cloud hosting services prove to be much less expensive than their more dated counterparts, for a number of reasons:

• Much like your mobile phone bill, cloud hosting services are usually arranged on a month-to-month or ‘pay-as-you-go’ package, depending on how predictable your requirements are. This allows you to tailor your package and ensure that you are not overpaying for the service that you require.

• Cloud hosting allows you operate your online services with a minimum of investment in hardware since almost everything occurs in ‘the cloud’

• Traditional desktop software is very expensive, as are the licensing fees to add extra users as your business grows. The cloud is usually available to you at a much less expensive rate, allowing you to grow and ensure that all employees can benefit from its collaborative capabilities

• Since it is more reliable than traditional web hosting services, the risks of financial losses through technological errors is minimized

Scalability

There is pretty much unlimited potential for up-sizing with most cloud hosting companies.

Even though the majority of businesses with an online presence will never reach the size where they need to worry about large and sustained increases in traffic, many do.

Tech startups are particularly susceptible to this issue, since this sector is notorious for incredible levels of growth within a very short space of time.

When such increases take place, cloud hosting provides the ability to expand the specifications of your package to meet the growing demand. This should help to offset the potential negative impacts that a large increase in traffic can have and ensure that you are not unfairly penalised for having exceeded your package allowances.

Disaster Recovery and Business continuity

The data and systems of many tech businesses are the most important assets that they own, since they form the bedrock of the business operations as well as its value and its future success.

Needless to say, they are something which needs to be protected at all costs.

Cloud hosting provides a higher degree of protection than traditional web hosting methods and can help reassure you that, should something go wrong, your valuable digital assets will be recoverable.

The cloud is the safest and most secure place that has ever existed when it comes to the storage of data, and regardless of what happens to your physical hardware (or that of your web hosting company) your digital operations are safely backed up and very easily recoverable.

This means that when worst comes to worst, the negative impact on your business should be as minimal as possible.

Do you need cloud hosting for your startup? We are delighted that selected tech startups can get 12 months free cloud hosting services up to the value of £1325 per month courtesy of our partners Rackspace. Here’s all the info on how you can apply and how we can help you with your application.

 

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Published on: 17th December 2014