Cloud hosting is a big revolution of the web and it has been widely adopted by both small and big businesses. The companies using cloud hosting will benefit from its reliability, speed, and easy management.
In terms of speed, cloud hosting even can provide much better performance than an advanced dedicated solution that costs $100/month. Cloud hosting is not only a convenient approach to hosting but also bring benefits regarding to training and operating costs of any company.
Most companies are using the pay per use model because the widespread of cloud and its agility and flexibility. However, it is more difficult to manage the costs of cloud hosting than you can imagine. Even when your businesses subscribe to a cloud hosting provider, choose a package with pre-defined performance and capacity, and decide on duration per day you want to run the servers, you will still have no control of the flexibility. We have the following restrictions:
- Price: Most of us are lured by the seemingly cheap and low service cost. In fact, you could have to pay more because most quoting tools and marketing material refer to on-demand or price per hour pricing model and default to minimum usage. It does not show the real cost of keeping the servers running all the time or any support services or expertise in designing and managing the service on an ongoing basis, which is so important for all businesses.
- Flexibility: We have restrictions in the choice of product sizes to cater for scalability. Therefore, you will lose the flexibility to modify your hosting services when you want to expand a server.
- Support: Support is often limited as they provide little or no after-sales support. This is really bad for businesses that require a managed service to keep their infrastructure running.
- Outages: A small outage or IT failure can cause significant disruptions as we have seen with Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently.
- Security: The global cost of data breaches has increased over the previous year, it shows a 23% increase and a huge hidden cost for those Cloud hosting providers.
When considering a hosting provider, you need to make sure you get enterprise-grade support and make sure the package you choose will include all costs like load balancing, a high level of security such as DDOS, as well as redundancy. If you don’t research all aspects of the cloud hosting, you will have to spend a more significant amount later.
