We often have to research and spec out hosting setups for clients and almost everytime the current hosting buzz word crops up: Cloud. Most of the time clients tell me they want cloud but they don’t know why, or worse – their reasoning is flawed. I don’t want to tell my clients they don’t know what they want, but there’s a huge misconception about cloud in the hosting sphere.
My understanding of a “Cloud Hosting” provider is a company that can deliver most or all of the necessary building blocks to set up an environment that is redundant on all possible levels, including location. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a good example of this with multiple regions and zones within regions, and they have abstracted many common services like mysql, memcached etc into their own products that can be set up in a way that provides true locational redundancy. However just because the service can be set up this way, doesn’t always mean it is. AWS itself is not a simple beast and often I see clients setting up a standard server in a single zone, without grasping the level of redundancy AWS can provide. Armed with just a single server, these clients are no better off on AWS than a traditional VPS provider or other cloud provider like VPS.NET or Dediserve.
VPS.NET and Dediserve really do simplify the process of Cloud Hosting and deliver it to the client at such a level even a beginner can understand. Their Virtual Private Servers (commonly abbreviated VPS or VDS or VMs) have basic cloud functionality built in with no work required on the user side; all user data is stored on a separate disk-only machine called a Storage Area Network (SAN), so even if the server your VPS is hosted on fails, your VPS will be booted up automatically on a different server. However, if the SAN fails that’s an awful lot of VPS’ offline for a prolonged period of time. Unlike AWS, there’s no protection against a datacentre-wide outage, so you still need to build a geo-redundant configuration if required. The missing component here compared to AWS is that you need extra tools such as DNS failover services to achieve this redundancy.
There are many traditional dedicated server providers, or non-cloud VPS providers like Linode, where all data is stored on-server rather than a SAN. The advantage of not using a SAN is that storage failures only affect single servers rather than hundreds of servers. On the other hand, if the server you’re hosted should fail, your downtime could be prolonged while your data is moved and/or reconstructed on another server.
So back to my title and why the cloud isn’t for everyone. Put simply, many clients I deal with on a daily basis do not need all the bells and whistles of something like AWS, and don’t strictly require their site/server to have 100.000% uptime. With AWS specifically, clients end up paying more for a basic service and use only a fraction of its potential, when they could purchase a more powerful traditional VPS or dedicated server at a lower cost. In my opinion, AWS is great for very large-scale site deploys where traffic may burst to very high volumes and extra horsepower is required to be brought online automatically. However AWS still has its drawbacks; in my experience the alloted CPU time for EC2 VPS’ is small, so for dynamic web sites – i.e. Magento-based online shops – clients are required to purchase much bigger VPS’ than actually required in order to benefit from extra CPU time. This is a costly process to do, and it often works out cheaper to have a large static pool of resources using traditional VPS hosting that can take all the load without issues.
Many providers wrongly sell their products as cloud and/or falsely add cloud to their product names, when the product they’re selling isn’t cloud at all. No namesdropping here (even though I could go on forever!), but I’m specifically targeting such companies that sell cPanel/WHM hosting as “cloud” to their customers, when in actual fact it’s not cloud and isn’t even redundant!
At Somerset Technical Solutions we like to do things differently. We work closely with the client to understand their requirements and business objectives in a detailed manner – before we even quote. We’re then able to tailor the correct solution to the client, which may be cloud-based, or a redundant traditional VPS configuration, or sometimes even shared hosting. Our solutions are based entirely on requirements and proven hosting technology, not buzzwords or over-priced hype products,which in turn brings your expenditure down and your satisfaction up. If you’re looking for hosting or need to review your current configuration then please get in touch.
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