Scaling up to the cloud
by Richard Matthews Technical Director
Posted on March 02, 2012
This month’s blog we are going to talk about cloud hosting and hopefully explain its benefits. We regularly have conversations with our clients in Surrey and beyond about their existing hosting and the benefits of hosting and managed back up with NXT Digital Solutions.
We have recently diversified our hosted environment and have scaled up to the cloud. So, if you are asking yourself, what is cloud hosting?
Let us explain:
Cloud hosting is a web hosting service delivered from a group of connected servers. The term cloud hosting (also called clustered hosting) is not precisely defined yet. In general, however, a hosting service can be considered cloud hosting when it is delivered from a fully redundant, multi-server system, in which the resources are dynamically scalable and often virtualized.
In less technical terminology, cloud hosting uses a number of servers all connected together (a cloud), and sites on the servers can use resources from all the servers in that cloud. Processing power, hard drives, and memory are shared. Servers can be easily added or removed as necessary, and if one server is down, sites use resources from other servers instead. This can be in one location or multiple locations connected across the internet.
So why is this important or useful to me? Well, there are quite a few benefits of cloud hosting:
- You pay for only the resources you need
- It provides good scalability
- You can easily increase or decrease resources without moving sites to other servers
- Servers can be deployed instantly
- It provides better uptime than other types of web hosting
- Traffic spikes aren't a problem; the cloud can handle them
- If the servers are in different datacenters, datacenter problems can be less of a concern.
- Different technologies can be used together that can't be used together without cloud hosting. For example, .php and .asp files can work on the same site, even in the same folder, drawing on technologies within the cloud.
- You don't need to install hardware or software. Instead, you connect with a cloud that has the hardware or software you need.
We manage and host over 50 client sites and would be more than happy to discuss your situation further.
About the Author
Richard heads up our technical / development teams overseeing all code creation and integrations. Richards primary skill set is a background in C# .NET but because of the diverse nature of the digital landscape Richard is very familiar with most frameworks and languages but he's happiest when "knee deep in the code". When Richard is out of the office he's either gardening (with a Peroni) or watching CBeebies & TinyPop with Harry and Ben.