How to Cut Costs With Cloud Computing

The term cloud computing is a general one, although in business, this represents a way to scale down the overhead infrastructure, as well as accomplish a high velocity of efficiencies. These types of efficiencies will include not just reduced costs, but will also increase the access to resources and data. This service may or may not help your company, as it depends on the size of the company you have, the needs you are looking to fulfill and the sales mandate. Before you decide to invest in this service, research and understand the implications and weigh them before your business model.

Cloud Hosting

Those who introduce cloud commuting to web hosting technology will see that this hosting allows a company to scale and rescale the resources they have in accordance to what their business needs are. You can easily adjust your own hosting packages as the traffic to your site fluctuates. When you enjoy this flexibility, your business can save precious money as you only pay for the resources that you need, while avoiding any downtime that occurs when servers go over their capacity.

As a recap, the services of cloud hosting are great for a technology-based business that meets the following:

1.Relies on Internet- based technology,

2.Is unable to over-invest in hosting solutions to stay on the safe side,
3.Frequently fluctuates in web traffic because of seasonal variations or as the company grows

Since many companies operate mostly on the Internet, they are not able to afford a large amount of down-time. Cloud hosting allows the business to lease their virtual server, and then personally arrange it on their own as-needed basis, so that it keeps up with growth and fluctuation.

Almost all cloud hosting providers will give their customers a choice of two different operating systems- either Windows or Linux. Also available is the self-service advantage that is usually given with different enterprise level hosting services. This is known as dedicated hosting. When you are looking for a cloud hosting service to use with your business, make sure that you get flexible billing as well as server configuration controls with an API or other web-based interface.

Cloud Storage

When you have cloud computing and it meets up with data back-up, your results are cloud storage. This type of solution will give companies not only the highest performance, but also highly-scalable storage of online data that will be able to be used three different ways:

1.As back up for the companies data,
2.For hosting media files,
3.Will allow company employees the ability to access the data they need from anywhere, with no need of a VPN connection

Companies that store a large amount of data on their local servers should consider the use of a data back-up with cloud storage services. Your employees will be able to access different files when they are not using the companies network, as well as cutting the costs that come with system network administration. And for business that rely on media files as a way to power their web properties, cloud storage solutions will greatly lower the costs of bandwidth with that media.

Remember, cloud storage isn’t ideal for sensitive date. If your company needs to keep their data secure and confidential, they should not allow it to be accessed from just anywhere. However, for files and other media that are not a security concern, the use of cloud storage can be the way to go.

Business in the Cloud

The bottom line is this. If your technology based business relies heavily on Internet presence, and experiences fluctuations because of seasonal factors and/or growth spurts, cloud computing may be an effective and inexpensive way to go. Just remember their may be security challenges when using cloud computing. When you rely on cloud computing, you do have less direct control of the data you have online. You may want to outsource some of your business components onto the cloud, but you may also wish to use in-house computing for more secure and important data, no matter the price of up-keep and maintenance.

Article by Charles Homes who is a consultant at Hosting.com, for more info check out their Managed Server Services.