If you own an up and coming online business, then cloud computing might be a great way to save money and increase your profits.
With cloud based hosting, there are lots of advantages to enjoy, including the fact that it makes good business sense. This form of hosting is secure, efficient, and allows your business to accomplish more with less. However you choose to look at it, cloud based hosting’s benefits are clear as day and lets your brand flourish in an increasingly competitive online world. So why settle for shared hosting or VPS when you can enjoy all the benefits of a dedicated hosting server for less money and with less stress with cloud based hosting.
Cloud based hosting can be used for all sorts of web purposes that are in line with your business goals and also facilitates your customers’ ability to transact securely on your website. While the concept of cloud based hosting might be difficult for some to grasp as they look up into the skies hoping to see the servers floating up above, this post will try to make clear to you the many financial gains your business can enjoy by opting for cloud based hosting.
Benefiting financially from being hosted in the clouds
Cloud based hosting can offer your website the power, performance, and scalability of dedicated server hosting at the price of virtual private server hosting. It is also easy to set up and you can get on board with a cloud based hosting service in little time. And to sweeten the deal, the service is often offered with a usage-based pricing model. What other financial benefits are there?
1. Fully utilized hardware
Cloud based hosting helps your business enjoy optimised economies of scale. This is evident in the high amount of resources your website will have at its disposal without having to worry about interference from other websites activities such as in the case of shared hosting. Your business’ website will have all the resources it needs and high scalability to overcome any dips or peaks in online activity and workloads on your website. Because your website can easily access any and all resources it needs when it needs it when being hosted by a cloud based hosting service provider, all your system’s hardware needs are optimised which in turn lets you enjoy less running costs for keeping your website online.
2. Paying less for power
Unlike a situation where a dedicated hosting server has been opted for and you have to pay extra for electricity to power the servers, cloud based hosting makes it possible for your business to use less electricity while enjoying benefits similar to what you’d get with your own dedicated server.
Also, even though the full potential of a dedicated server is never constantly in use, it still consumes a large amount of electricity and leads to idle servers wasting energy and racking up bills. There’s also the cost of running a cooling system to maintain the temperature of the servers. With a cloud based service, this wastefulness is nullified.
3. Lower people costs
When your business website is working with a dedicated hosting server, you will need to have on staff a IT department to constantly monitor and manage the servers. With cloud based hosting, you don’t need to keep a whole team of server engineers on retainer. Competent IT professionals are expensive and their specialised skills don’t come cheap, but none of this will be your concern when you sign up for cloud based hosting because your service provider takes care of that aspect and guarantees you keep enjoying uninterrupted hosting services.
When using cloud services, part of the money you pay goes to paying the provider’s staff. But the amount you pay in such a situation is insignificant when compared to what you’d have to pay if you had such staff working in-house.
4. Little to no capital costs
There are bound to be up-front capital costs when you run and own your own servers. But why go through all that when there’s the perfectly good option of cloud based hosting where the burden of such a capital investment is someone else’s problem.
No doubt there are those who can work out some magic math to convince you that the cost of running your own servers yourself gets spread over the life of the server. But that’s still money out of your pocket that you don’t necessarily have to spend. If you opt for cloud based hosting instead, that’s money you can instead directly invest into your business.
5. Resilience without a need for redundancy
When running your own servers, you need to stock up on components for replacing parts in case of a failure or server upgrades. Having spare hardware just lying around and which you might never use is clearly an expensive way to ensure your ecommerce site’s constant availability.
But by opting for cloud based dedicated server hosting, your service provider takes care of all redundancy worries for you without you having to pay any extra dime.
What else is there?
If the financial benefits of cloud computing were not enough to convince you, what about the environmental benefits? If you are looking for a green way to run an online business, then cloud computing is definitely a great way to go. By using cloud services, your business becomes greener in the two following ways
As earlier mentioned, you’ll be saving energy.
Secondly, you take advantage of the systems and resources the web hosting provider already has in place to minimise its data centers’ carbon footprint. In other words, you are also reducing your carbon footprint, thus saving money which you might have ended up spending on carbon offsets.