Businesses often wonder what cloud hosting brings to the table. But what they fail to understand is that it offers them the platform through which they can bring affordability, security, flexibility, and continuity to their business. As the cloud platform gains popularity, the market is getting flooded with more and more cloud hosting service providers.
Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, CloudOye, Google Cloud, etc are some of the most popular providers of Cloud hosting services. However, as you decide to move to the cloud, you need to do careful analysis and assessment to understand your business requirement. It will help you to search for the right and reliable service provider.
What to look for when selecting the right cloud hosting service provider?
1. Setup and Performance
An efficient cloud service provider must be able to incorporate the setup and structure with your workflows. They must provide you with services that are scalable and contribute to your business growth. Performance and reliability are some of the features that you must not overlook. Since you will have multiple users, you definitely do not want the performance issues.
When you pick the best-in-industry experts, they offer you 99.999% uptime. It means your websites must run smoothly 24*7*365 with minimal downtime to ensure a premium experience to the users.
2. Compliance
It is also pivotal to ensure that the cloud computing services meet the industry compliance standards and use the required organizational framework. Check their credibility and past experience to enjoy hassle-free services. Make sure the services you require can be easily achieved by the service provider.
3. Security
Security is the prime concern of all major organizations. Before businesses join hands with any service provider they want to know about their security goals. It is vital to understand their cyber security strategy.
Make sure that their security measures are matching your business requirement. Ensure that their system is efficient enough to provide protection to your data and applications. Analyze what security features they are offering for free and what are the additional charges for the features you want. Enquire about any third-party integrations if there are any.
No matter which hosting service provider you choose, they must be able to handle and manage your host as well as your physical setup. The services must include multi-step authentication, intrusion detection, encryption of data and information with the best firewalls and security measures.
Especially, if your business lacks internal expertise, you must do a proper analysis of the security features that the service provider is offering. It is the reason why you must want to engage an IT expert who can handle your cyber security and hosting services with perfection.
4. Backup & Disaster Recovery
Data backup and recovery should be your top-most concern when it comes to hiring cloud hosting service providers. Check if they are offering the ease and convenience of an easy backup process. Most of the major leading cloud service providers offer cost-efficient, user-friendly and comprehensive cloud backup solutions.
A best practice cloud disaster recovery solution – a way to restore your own hosting service in the event of a major interruption such as a natural disaster – should also be simple, secure, scalable, and inexpensive. It is essential for cloud hosting India providers to offer disaster recovery as a standard feature.
5. Service and Support
Additionally, you should spend time understanding how much time your cloud provider will require of you to manage. Your business team should consider how much time it will need to devote to managing your cloud infrastructure and how easily you can integrate and support your key services.
Cloud hosting is a hassle-free and effective alternative to directly dealing with cloud hosting providers for many small and medium-sized businesses.
An important element of your cloud hosting contract is the Service Level Agreement (SLA). In your contract, you should clearly define any strict availability, capacity, response time, or support requirements you have. A service level agreement (SLA) provides a legal contract that enables you to rely on your provider.
It is also essential to have easy access to support. If you are a small to medium business, you may find it easier to access cloud-hosting services through an experienced and responsive IT company, which may also give you unlimited local support 24*7.
6. Costs
For most businesses, cost is always a major consideration, although it shouldn’t be the only factor. Major players offer an array of pricing options, including per-hour, per-second, volume discounts, pay-per-use, etc.
Azure Cloud Hosting charges customers based on access to products by the hour, gigabyte, or millions of executions. Business models and budgets of small to medium businesses can be met with an effective – and cost-effective – solution.
Although choosing the cheapest solution may seem appealing, you may not receive optimum services and solutions. So look for a provider that offers flexible pricing and comprehensive services at a cost-effective price.
7. Architecture
You must analyze how the platform’s architecture will fit into your work processes both now and in the coming years when selecting a cloud provider. It might be preferable to proceed with Azure if, for example, your organization is already heavily invested in the Microsoft universe (and receives free credits from Microsoft). If your organization relies more on Amazon or Google services, then it may be best to look to those vendors for ease of integration and consolidation.
8. Storage
If you choose cloud storage, you may also want to consider its architecture. Generally speaking, the three major vendors are similar in terms of architecture, and they offer different types of storage based on user requirements. However, they all offer different methods of archiving. If this is important to you, you will want to understand the nuanced differences.
Each of these services offers a variety of options for storing and retrieving data regularly as well as infrequently (hot vs. cool storage). Typically, cool storage is less expensive but presents various limitations.
Conclusion
So, to make sure, you only get the best from the selected cloud hosting services, keep all these factors in mind. It will help you make an informed decision and select hassle-free cloud hosting services.
