Why the Cloud & What the Heck is it?
When people say “cloud” hosting they are referring to a group of dedicated servers that are tethered together to pool resources like hard drive space and CPU cycles to make a “super computer”. Different parts of the cloud can be located in different data centers and workloads can be spread around to different parts of the cloud seamlessly. This makes it easy to add or remove resources at any time. These days many companies have their own cloud infrastructure built on top of the main providers like like Rackspace, AWS, Softlayer/IBM & Google. Our own cloud infrastructure is spread across several providers.
1. A One Click World
One click spin ups of a server that youve pre configured or the ability to add additional resources in a few clicks can save hundreds of man hours per year. Your servers can be ready and serving traffic in five minutes or less.
2. The Speed Factor
OK this one may be cheating because technically its *very* similar to #1 but from a clients perspective the cloud can help you get your products and services to market faster and connect employees to customers virtually anywhere around the world.
3. Flexibility is Key
Cloud-based services are ideal for businesses with fluctuating resource needs. If your demands increase it’s easy to scale up your cloud capacity, drawing on other parts of the cloud. Likewise, if you need to scale down again, the flexibility is there. This allows the cloud to adjust to meet your demands in a quick click.
These three benefits alone would be enough to convince many businesses to move their websites into the cloud but when you consider that we are merely scratching the surface, its a no brainer! The cloud is here to stay. The cloud is watching! 🙂
