The cloud has changed everything. In just a few short years, cloud infrastructure and cloud computing has totally changed the world of IT and web infrastructure – for good.
The cloud market was slated to hit a watermark $208 billion by the end of 2016, and it seems that the move towards cloud-based computing, server architecture, and infrastructure isn’t slowing down anytime soon.
The cloud is becoming especially common for web infrastructure. Companies that offer cloud-based web hosting like Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and others are constantly growing in market share.
Individuals have long been using cloud-based, remotely hosted web servers for their websites – the expense of using your own web server is tremendous if you’re just hosting a single website – but some companies still use on-site web servers to host their websites.
These legacy servers are on their way out – as cloud hosting becomes cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable, it seems almost inevitable that the future of the web is on the cloud.
If you’re still skeptical, here are 5 reasons you should be convinced that cloud hosting is the future of web infrastructure.
- Higher Uptime And Reliability
Cloud-based hosting services are almost always more reliable than on-premises web infrastructure.
This is because cloud hosting services are always heavily redundant – any power outage, connectivity issue, or storage problem encountered by a specific server node or cluster can be dealt with quickly while other servers take over the computing and networking loads of the failed unit.
Compare this to your on-premises web infrastructure – how often does your corporate website go down due to maintenance, patching, or unexpected equipment failure?
When you use cloud-based web infrastructure, you can lower your website’s downtime to nearly nil, allowing you and your IT team to focus on what’s important instead of wondering if your front-facing website is down.
- Faster Page Load Times
It’s very expensive to build a fast, reliable on-premises web server. However, cloud-based web infrastructure centers are chock-full of the most blazing fast, purpose-built server clusters out there, with fast processors, solid state drives, and gigantic storage capacities.
This allows web infrastructure to serve up your website more quickly to visitors, which is crucial to converting customers – long loading times lead to high “bounce rates”. Simply put, if your page doesn’t load quickly, your website visitors aren’t going to wait around. They’re going to go to your competitors.
- Lower Up-Front Costs
One of the huge advantages of web hosting in the cloud is that you only pay for what you use. When you use an on-premises server, any equipment, power, or capacity that goes unused is totally wasted. If you have a gigantic web server that’s just running a couple consumer-facing sites and is mostly idling all day, you’ve wasted money setting it up, maintaining it, and running it.
When you use a web hosting IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) model, you can purchase only the capacity and processing power that you need for your particular organization, and increase your storage space and other infrastructure later on, if necessary.
This means your company can invest less capital – but still have a reliable, high-performing web infrastructure.
- Higher Scalability
Upgrading your own web servers can be a hard, thankless task. With cloud-based web infrastructure, it’s as easy as flipping a switch, or making a call to your services provider. You can add on more capacity whenever you need to, quickly and easily.
And given the huge size and tremendous processing power of dedicated web hosting services, you’ll never have to worry about your needs outpacing the ability of your service provider – they can always keep up, no matter what your particular needs are.
- Easy, Hands-Off Maintenance
You barely have to conduct any maintenance on your website when you host it in the cloud. Server patches, infrastructure changes, equipment repair and replacement – these things are all handled seamlessly by your cloud hosted solutions provider. You never have to worry about any of it – just upgrading and maintaining your own website as necessary, and as required by your company.
Host On The Cloud – Save Money And Time
A huge amount of businesses already use the cloud in some capacity – it’s estimated that at least 95% of businesses are using some kind of public or private cloud.
It’s not a mystery why. Cloud computing is the wave of the future – by outsourcing infrastructure, services, and applications to cloud-based SaaS or IaaS companies, organizations can save time and money, and increase their business agility and scalability.
So if your company is still avoiding cloud-based infrastructure, start small – start the conversation about switching to a cloud-based web infrastructure. Once you make the switch, you’ll immediately see why so many other companies have already begun hosting their web infrastructure on the cloud.