We understand that there is a lot of jargon and technical language in the IT world, which can make it hard to know what IT services or support you really need for your business. In this blog, we’re going to demystify cloud hosting and explain how it can benefit your business.
So, let’s start with the obvious question…
What is cloud hosting?
It’s often easiest to explain this by beginning with what cloud hosting is not. Imagine a room full of servers in your business premises, which provide the computing power for your company. This is a traditional on-premises solution and it’s what was needed before the arrival of the internet.
Web hosting was the next step. Think of it as a bridge between this traditional approach and cloud hosting. With web hosting, instead of having the servers on your premises, you effectively rent server space from a web host which is used to ensure your website is accessible online.
Web hosting allows you to save and store all of your website content to a server that you access via the internet. There’s no need for that server to be geographically near you – all you need is your internet connection and you’re good to go.
This brings us to cloud hosting. From your perspective as a customer, the service won’t feel that different. You are still storing your data on servers that you don’t physically have to own or maintain.
However, rather than storing all the data on a single server, cloud hosting enables your data and content to be stored over multiple virtual and physical servers, often spread across different locations to minimise risk.
How does cloud hosting benefit my business?
First and foremost, it reduces the risk of you losing your data. This is because instead of relying on one physical server to hold all the information, the system spreads it out across a network of servers.
As we already mentioned, this minimises risk. For example, should a server in one location have a catastrophic failure or be damaged in a fire or flood, you won’t lose all of your data. In fact, you’re unlikely to lose any of it because cloud hosting providers typically hold multiple backups of their customers’ data within their network.
The other huge advantage to cloud hosting is that it ensures you’re only paying for the computing power that you actually need at any given time. Most cloud hosting services operate on a pay-as-you-go or subscription model, allowing you to adjust the level of data storage and computing power to match your business.
This can be especially useful in sectors such as retail, where traffic during Black Friday can significantly spike, but within a week or two drop right down again. When your website and systems are hosted on the cloud, it’s easy to scale them up to meet that spike and then bring them down again afterwards.
Scalability on its own is another benefit of cloud hosting – not just in terms of the cost but in relation to the ability to scale up what you need. Your cloud hosting company can easily spin up new virtual machines that form part of your virtual server network if you need additional capacity, for instance.
Compare that to having to buy new hard drives or servers if you were to physically host your own data and you can see the difference both in cost and ease!
Is my business data safe in the cloud?
Yes! Cloud hosting is an incredibly safe way to store your business’ data for several reasons. First and foremost, cloud hosting providers implement rigorous safety protocols and have dedicated security teams who spend their time ensuring that every server is protected from the latest virtual threats.
Because their whole business is reliant on being able to keep your business running, they take security very seriously. This means they have advanced encryption and firewalls, and that they will undertake regular security updates. You don’t need to worry about any of this as your cloud provider will do it all in the background.
Should your business suffer from some kind of disaster – whether a power cut, an extreme weather event or another scenario that damages your computers – you can be confident that you’ll be back up and running quickly when you have cloud hosting.
This is because data is stored across multiple locations and regularly backed up on your cloud service. So, even if your laptop has been swept away in a flood, as long as you can access the internet you’ll still be able to access all the data and information you’d saved to the cloud.