Author: Curtis Bagnall, Solution Engineer
If there’s one thing that everybody can agree on, it’s that technology is always changing. Here at Umbrella, it’s something we’re always trying to stay ahead of so we can provide the best support and options to our clients. Today, I wanted to speak on the topic of hosting your servers in the cloud and related pros and cons.
What benefits would you see from moving your servers to a cloud based solution?
The number one benefit is that you no longer need to worry about hardware issues, backups, or having the need to replace your server every five years to stay up to date. In the cloud, you simply pay a monthly operations cost instead of paying a big, up front capital expense for your hardware.
In the cloud, your server is set up with redundancy. Meaning that if the hardware that is currently running your server in the cloud should fail, there are other servers available immediately. This makes downtime due to a server failure a thing of the past.
Another great option for cloud based servers is scalability. As your company grows, your server resources generally grow with it. On a physical server at your location, you can only manage growth to a point until you need to get a new server that allows for further expansion. In the cloud, that’s not an issue. There’s an entire data center full of servers that allow your company to grow as quickly as you can while supporting that growth automatically.
With every Ying, there is always a Yang.
The cloud currently isn’t the best solution for every company. One of the reasons it wouldn’t be a great fit for a smaller business is due to the current cost of cloud hosting. Although pricing continues to decrease every day for a hosted option, the cost is still cheaper to have an on-premise server if you have one or two servers at your company.
Another risk would be that your point of failure is dependent on your internet connection. If your internet service provider has a failure and your internet is out, you would no longer be able to access any of your hosted servers. There are many ways to minimize this problem, such as having hot spots readily available, but it’s still a point of failure.
We’re now offering Cloud Hosting solutions for our clients. Over time, prices for cloud based hosting will continue to come down, making it an attractive option for all businesses. If you would like to know more, please give us a call!