Cloud computing providers such as Amazon EC2 and Google Cloud Platform offer High Availability Solutions. There are other companies which offer Cloud Solutions but Amazon and Google are the leaders in the cloud hosting market.
What are some benefit of using cloud computing:
- Scalability – Cloud services allow you to scale your service almost immediately, allowing you to provision new instances instantly. You can also set up auto scaling if you expect traffic spikes. Extra CPU, memory and disk space can be added easily.
- Load Balancing – Major cloud service providers such as Amazon and Google will allow you to load balance your servers across different region in the world. You can deploy instances in different regions and route your visitors to the nearest instance providing lowest possible latency for them hence a faster browsing experience for your website.
- Cost Effective – You only pay for what you use. You can scale your usage up and down and you pay accordingly.
- Flexibility – Multiple hosting environment can be set up using different operating system, programming language, database, etc.
- Easy Backup – One key benefit of cloud computing is that they allow you to create backup of your instances easily. Snapshots can be taken which is better than the standard file base backup services.
Do Cloud Computing offer 100% uptime?
Although Cloud Services are generally considered High Availability (HA) services, they do experience downtime. In 2012, Amazon EC2 experienced down time due to a severe thunder storm which created a massive power outage which brought down the data centre. This has brought down services such as Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest with them. In February this year, the Google Cloud Platform experience about 2 hours of downtime due to network and technical issues. These events demonstrate that even multi billion dollar companies still cannot achieve 100% uptime and redundancy is required outside the cloud.
At ANS Communications we can help you website to migrate to the cloud. We can design, deploy, migrate, and manage your cloud for you. Live backup outside the cloud can also be set up to make sure your website will be up even if the cloud goes down. We do this by load balancing your site in different locations and networks securely through the cloud infrastructure and your application.