Almost every hosting company in the world today has a cloud hosting solution. The benefits of using a real cloud hosting plan can be narrowed down to two main points:
1. No hardware failures or maintenance to worry about
2. Services are easily scalable on demand, saving time and money
The world cloud is being tossed around a lot, so make sure to do your homework before considering a cloud hosting company. There are a number of different platforms and methods out there, and to make sense of it all we have narrowed down questions you can ask any cloud host. To quickly gauge what cloud services are right for your business, you should know.
What Operating Systems are Available?
For instance, does the cloud service allow for Microsoft Windows? What about 32 and 64 bit support?Are clients lumped in the same local network in a NAT configuration?
This question will put a lot of cloud hosts in a hot seat. While this is quite common, it is the cause for a variety of security concerns, as a malicious attacker can exploit the network hierarchy to compromise your systems.
How is my data stored? Are there redundancies beyond a single RAID configuration?
This will be revealing of the performance and reliability you can expect from your cloud host. Make sure that the hardware in place can sustain multiple disk failures. Performance-wise, you can also ask about reading and write speed caps.
Do all customer virtual machines share the same processors and memory?
Typically the answer is yes, causing valid security concerns to arise.
To give your comparisons some perspective, here is what Volico offers:
The visual aid above depicts Volico’s cloud service, which gives clients their own dedicated network port on a Cisco 7600 series router, dedicated RAM slot, and dedicated CPUs. This promotes security and performance without compromise. Cloud services that do not uphold these standards offer this:
As new cloud services emerge on the marketplace, be sure that your host built the cloud service to benefit the customer, not to save a few dollars by cutting corners.
