Is Cloud Hosting Reliable Or Not?

By Author: Angela Jones
Total Articles: 7
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When cloud was introduced in year 2011, unfortunately this resulted in failure of the Cloud in several cases. The major news on the Cloud outage was at the Northern Virginia datacenter which was hosted by Amazon’s April. Cloud couldn’t be trusted for business-critical Web applications; this was a quick evidence of the outage (Which raised question about Cloud Reliability for prudent CIO).

Cloud Services actually got vast new options either about flexibility and scalability. High level of diligence is needed in Cloud architectures, while servicing is outsourced to the cloud. The basic concerns as “somebody else’s problem”, is not the reliable thing for Cloud.

Planning

Before Cloud Hosting designing of any architecture gather input to determine to build infrastructure.

- Which web application I need in hosting?
- Is application business critical, does it require 100% uptime?
- What is the cost of the downtime or data loss?
- Disaster event and its back-end applications.

These are the basis question need to be answered before starting any project plan; else ...
... this might destined to failure.

Provider

Now that you have planned what is the requirement it’s time to look for Cloud Hosting providers. Make conversation with real human being (taking to customer executive than to automatic machine), discuss about the initial pricing so have better idea of the market, have one who keep honest.

Locations

Determining location must be based on latency or performance guarantees, which might impact network placement. For an instance if the users are in New York, setting up datacenter in Los Angeles doesn’t make any sense. But if application require 100% uptime, having datacenter in more than one location, unplanned emergency won’t inform and come.

The best part of Cloud Hosting is that, the backup capacity is cheap. Another important thing to ask from provider is about the disaster recovery option, of which you can reduce the business risk.

Data and Monitoring

With these questions and provider solution you know Cloud Hosting is reliable or not. Monitoring the process for failovers, test should happen regularly and also it must be documented for its redundancy.

Finally, few more question on Monitoring data.

- Where the data will be stored?
- What if primary data center goes down, even then can the critical data is accessible?
- What is the transition time for any DR (Disaster Recovery) Data center?
- How will one know critical service is offline?

Make sure you communicate contact information (phone number of data base team) and processes in advance to all critical personnel. The Cloud Hosting is perfect for companies looking to deploy scalable and reliable Websites and Web applications.