Managed cloud hosting

When it comes to managing resources, proper planning is one of the main tasks of any company. It doesn’t matter whether it’s capital, work materials, or personnel: if you don’t calculate in advance and regularly update your business processes, you can expect bot­tle­necks in material and personnel and financial losses in the long term. One thing that many business owners are quick to forget in the planning phase is hosting. The internal IT in­fra­struc­ture, business and customer data, and not to mention the concrete web project itself require cor­re­spond­ing server struc­tures, which in turn, depending on the size and growth of the company, places very different demands on the necessary hardware.

Finding the right hosting provider and leasing the right server resources is often a very difficult task. If resources aren’t high enough, you need to re­cal­cu­late and reorder very quickly, or you risk limiting your output. If resources are too high, often a large amount will go unused and so budget is un­nec­es­sar­i­ly wasted. One solution to this problem that is growing in pop­u­lar­i­ty is what’s known as managed cloud hosting. It’s char­ac­ter­ized by simple and fully flexible scal­a­bil­i­ty, meaning you only get the resources you require and you can request to change them at short notice.

Managed cloud hosting brings together the ad­van­tages of pro­fes­sion­al server man­age­ment and cloud computing – a term that refers to shared computer pro­cess­ing resources on demand.

Strictly speaking, the following three elements of cloud computing are used in this hosting solution:

• In­fra­struc­ture as a Service (IaaS): it doesn’t matter whether the vir­tu­al­ized server resources are shared over the internet or come from a private data center – cloud hosting services always make hardware in­fra­struc­ture available for different projects as a matter of course.

• Platform as a Service (PaaS): the system platform is built on the cloud in­fra­struc­ture. This means all system-technical software elements that can be used to run ap­pli­ca­tions like a web server or web de­vel­op­ment tools.

• Software as a Service (SaaS): managed cloud hosting means you don’t need to worry about the in­stal­la­tion and updating of your ap­pli­ca­tions software. Usually, you simply select your choice of ap­pli­ca­tions like content man­age­ment systems or online shop software from the dashboard and install them with one click onto your rented cloud server.

It’s not just web projects that can be made a reality by using services like these as a basis. Cloud servers represent an excellent al­ter­na­tive for storage and backup locations for all types of files as well as other business ap­pli­ca­tions. The ‘managed’ component of this service is guar­an­teed to save you a lot of time and effort, no matter what purpose you use the hosting en­vi­ron­ment for in the end. And since all your data will be in the cloud, you can access it from anywhere with any device, provided you have an active internet con­nec­tion.

The most decisive advantage that cloud hosting offers when compared with al­ter­na­tive solutions is the ease of scal­a­bil­i­ty across all resources. You can increase or decrease your storage space, pro­cess­ing per­for­mance, or random access memory in real time, allowing you to react to your company’s de­vel­op­ments and continue to optimize your resources. If you’re re­spon­si­ble for a newly founded company, or an operator of an online shop, you’re likely to profit par­tic­u­lar­ly highly from this option. This is because, as a newly founded company manager, you’re likely to find it difficult to estimate your resource re­quire­ments due to un­cer­tain­ty over your future, while as an online shop operator, you’ll probably suffer from daily and seasonal fluc­tu­a­tions in your website visitors. In these instances, a precise live tuning of resources that can be cal­cu­lat­ed in real time is the perfect solution. And the typical billing model of managed cloud hosting is pay-as-you-use, meaning you don’t need to worry.

Cloud services are regularly in the public eye, usually due to concerns about existing security gaps and potential risks. So it’s perhaps un­sur­pris­ing that cloud hosting is often viewed rather crit­i­cal­ly by customers. But the pro­tec­tion of a managed cloud server isn’t any more of a security risk than other hosting solutions available. In fact, thanks to the mobility and in­de­pen­dence of certain hardware, some view cloud hosting as even more secure than its al­ter­na­tives. And the es­tab­lished hosts in cloud hosting can focus fully on pro­tect­ing customer data, as it’s in their interests. In this way, a rented cloud server is normally more secure than other solutions like a self-hosted dedicated server, for example.

Problems regarding security only occur in cases when the cloud concept also includes external servers outside of the host’s data center. Here, the following two aspects may raise some concerns:

1. The hosting provider re­lin­quish­es control over security of the server. This would then mean that the parties involved would need to initiate the necessary steps to protect user data.
2. The server locations may be spread around the world. Ignoring the fact that the data access speed will be affected, multiple locations should raise le­git­i­mate concerns as to whether all personal data is being properly protected.

Once you’ve found a hosting service that meets your re­quire­ments of data pro­tec­tion and security and also supports the software you use, it’s time to choose your per­son­al­ized start setup. It’s helpful if you already have a rough idea of the hardware resources you need, as this can help get your new project off to the best possible start. But since you have the option of changing your per­for­mance packet at any time, you’ve got some leeway here. Managed cloud hosting provider’s usually offer a number of fixed tariff models with generous perks, if for example, you pay for a bulk amount of resources in advance. But if you opt for a model like this, you’ll only save money if you actually use these resources. So make sure you calculate proper estimates in advance to ensure you’re not wasteful.

Choosing the right payment model is the toughest question when it comes to managed cloud hosting. Most users tend to find that they can only determine the optimal solution for their web project once they’ve analyzed monthly or even seasonal resource usage figures and then cal­cu­lat­ed exact re­quire­ment figures. But in cases of strong growth or a very varied use of resources, we strongly recommend you choose a cloud host offering the flexible pay-as-you-use model.