Decisions regarding your company’s web presence are among the most important a CEO or CIO can make. In most cases, it’s the first impression a potential client or consumer has of your company. Due diligence when selecting a cloud hosting provider for your company’s web presence is essential.
There’s numerous things to consider when selecting the right cloud hosting provider for your company. We’ll examine important considerations, as well as what makes a prospective provider stand out from the rest.
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Pricing : Pricing is crucial. No one wants to pay too much for hosting, but making a decision driven entirely by price can be expensive over time. Some providers rely on extremely cheap pricing to attract customers. However, that rock-bottom rate could mean they use consumer- (not enterprise-) grade hardware, poor support or suffer from unexpected downtime.
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Knowledge : Cloud hosting providers shouldn’t just be proficient, they should be experts in the subject and in any software you’ll use (your company’s needs may vary, but often this includes a Linux or Unix variant). If you have any questions during the sales process, don’t be afraid to ask. This often reveals the prospective support team’s expertise and response time.
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Fiscal Stability : Ask the hard questions to potential hosting vendors. How long have they been operating? Does the company actually own its equipment and data? Does it rent from another company? Putting your company’s most precious commodity in a hosting company’s hands requires trust — and trust demands hard questions.
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Managed Easily : Find a cloud hosting provider that allows easy management of your server, especially if you encounter a problem. The control panel should be intuitive and include tools for rebooting, restoring, or putting your server in rescue mode for recovery. Dealing with a complicated, unfriendly interface during a problem means downtime.
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Network Ownership : An ideal cloud hosting provider should have access to their own routers, ensuring network stability. This detail is important and often overlooked. A provider must be able to adapt to conditions in real-time and this demands a stable network. They should have total control over their network infrastructure. This means optimizing routes on-demand, not just mitigating problems.
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Customer-Oriented : Some providers are only concerned with quick sales and profits, often resulting in a poor customer experience. Ensure the hosting provider is responsive to both sales and trouble requests, with 24/7 support. Message the sales or support team with a question to test their response time.
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Scalability : Your hosting service should be able to upgrade and expand the resources of your cloud servers at a moment’s notice. As your site grows, upgrades should take place easily and adapt to your server’s requirements as your traffic grows. If your site requires extra attention such as monitoring, management or even DDoS protection, choose a cloud host that has expertise in these fields.
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Platform : Determine if the cloud hosting provider owns their platform. Many cloud hosting providers simply buy off-the-shelf software from a third party to manage their servers. You may need to wait longer for new features or simply find in the long run the software offers less flexibility. Having the expertise in a platform and escalation procedures — which comes from developing a platform in-house — is crucial if something goes askew.
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API : Does the cloud hosting provider offer an API to extend their control panel, and offer the flexibility to manage and provision servers via the API? In addition to scalability, flexibility and choice are key when managing numerous servers.
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Reach : Do you serve customers in only one market or do you require a global cloud presence? Research a potential cloud provider’s cloud locations and determine if you can deploy to latency-sensitive areas. Hosting your website on a cloud server located on the other side of the world can lead to a poor global customer experience.
The relationship you should have with a cloud host should be based on openness and confidence. It is not something that should be entered into lightly. If a prospective host can’t provide either to your satisfaction, the results could be disastrous.
We have many long-term relationships with customers who trust us with their cloud hosting needs. Want to find out more? Contact us.