What are the benefits of cloud hosting?

If you’ve heard of cloud hosting, but you’re either unsure of what exactly it means and unclear of how exactly it would benefit your business, you’re in the right place…

What is a cloud hosting?

The days of building your own in-house, on-premise tech stack are slipping away, and companies are transitioning to a much simpler means of hosting their data, services and solutions.

Cloud hosting enables businesses to make significant savings on platforms, software and infrastructure. Instead of building your own tech stack, you can utilise services like Microsoft Azure, which can provide a secure, scalable, high-performing service that supports a variety of operating systems, databases, tools, programming languages and devices.

So, what is the benefit of adopting cloud hosting technology?

Cloud services are taking an increasingly predominant role in the way in which we all operate, from storing photos, to creating websites that have the ability to scale to meet spikes in customer demand, and from sharing files via DropBox, to streamlining and coordinating large data sets to one backup place.

Cloud hosting takes the approach of utilising a shared infrastructure, removing that cumbersome, often complicated process of building and hosting your own private storage facilities and systems.

There is a long, varied list of benefits to adopting cloud technologies and incorporating a cloud hosting… Here’s a handful of them…

Savings

Arguably the most important benefit of adopting a cloud hosting is savings, both in time and costs.

Building and managing your own on-premise hosting solution not only absorbs your time and resources, it can be very costly, with maintenance and repairs being a constant consideration – this means significant outgoings… Outgoings which can be reduced by switching to the cloud.

Though moving to a third-party provider comes with a subscription/license fee, it is significantly less time consuming than an on-premise solution and frees up your internal resources, negating any worries you may have around maintaining your existing solution and how any downtime might affect your customers.

Scalability

Scalability in cloud computing is the ability to quickly and easily increase or decrease the size or power of your website to meet spikes in demand.

Imagine you are a pensions provider and the current furlough scheme has been cut short, a lot of your customers are likely to want to contact you to see if they can release any money from their pension pot to financially support themselves. This could mean a massive influx of traffic to your site. Could your current hosting solution handle this influx, or would it fall short of the mark, leaving many customers frustrated?

For many of our clients, this level of scalability is vitally important, it enables their customers to continue to access their digital estate without interruption, even during times of crisis such as power outages or storms, where customer traffic may increase significantly.

Having the ability to scale differentiates a thriving business from one that lacks the flexibility to meet customer demand.

Flexible pricing structures

Most other hosting options are provided with a flat rate fee, meaning you pay the same amount every month/quarter/year regardless of whether or not you utilise those server resources. When it comes to cloud hosting, it’s very much as a pay-as-you-go process, you only pay for the resources you have utilised.

So, if you’re an insurance company that has experienced peaks of traffic on your website throughout the outbreak of COVID-19, your resources would only need to be scaled up during that surge in traffic, and your costs would only increase due to the amount of server resources you’ve used during that time.

Availability

If you’re using on-premise hosting, you’ll know that the uptime of your digital estate depends upon the physical server environment.

If your server environment goes offline, then so does your website. What could this mean for your customers? This is particularly pertinent now, when customers have very limited access to call centres and are far more likely to interact with your company via digital channels.

Cloud hosting has high uptime and availability built into its structure, for example Microsoft Azure guarantees at least 99.9% availability. As your site is virtually utilising the resources of several servers, if one was to experience technical issues you would simply be transferred to another, and your customers could continue to interact with you. This is crucial to providing a consistently outstanding digital customer experience.

Competitive edge

Not every company has made the decision to migrate to cloud hosting, at least not yet anyway. Organisations that make the decision are already leveraging the benefits to better serve their customers and increase the efficiency of their digital estates.

The public cloud service market Is expected to reach $623.3 billion by 2023 worldwide. The time to adopt a cloud hosting technology and begin leveraging cloud services is now.

If you would like to discuss how you can migrate from older systems to cloud hosting, further discuss what the benefits are, and discover how we can help you, contact us today.