Cloud Hosting has its own set of benefits such as high reliability and massive scalability. But when it comes to choosing a Cloud Hosting provider, you should do a thorough evaluation of all the features and services they have to offer. After analysing many of the industry leading Cloud Hosting service providers, we have narrowed down to 4 great features that you should definitely look for. Of course, these features go beyond the basic aspects such as hardware specifications and costing and help improve the overall efficiency of your website.
Caching: Having a fast website is not only important from an SEO standpoint, but is also important for ensuring your website provides the best experience to users. Nobody likes a slow website and making people wait can have a negative impact on the website’s conversions. The key to optimizing your website will begin with Hosting. In Cloud Hosting, there is an array of servers that are used to distribute the resources needed to run your website. At times certain servers in the Cloud can be slower or may suffer downtime or hardware failures. Although this may not lead to your website downtime, there is a chance it might affects the speed of the website.
That being said, if the Cloud Hosting service provider integrated caching within their cloud infrastructure, it can drastically help improve your website’s overall speed. With caching, certain requests can be handled directly between the cache memory and browser, without the need of reaching the servers. Certain Cloud Hosting providers provide Varnish Caching within their Cloud Hosting plans which has the potential to improve the website by 1000X. You should surely explore the caching options that your Cloud Hosting service provider has to offer.
Data Mirroring: Disasters can happen at any point. Apart from high performance and speed, your Cloud Hosting service provider should also ensure your data is safe and secure. Moreover, data loss may also happen without any disaster or hardware failure. For instance, if your website is sabotaged by internal or external factors or if the latest build had compliance issues leading to data loss, what do you do in such scenarios?
It would always be a good idea if your Cloud Hosting service provider takes care of data mirroring so that you have enough backup to act as a stable restore point in case of any dire situation. This heavily depends on the Cloud Hosting storage architecture. The Cloud Hosting provider that I have appointed, utilizes Ceph Storage architecture that has your data mirrored across 3 distinct devices on multiple drives and cabinets to ensure seamless transition in the event of any hardware issues.
cPanel Access to Monitor Performance: The true scalability of Cloud can be only leveraged when you have a keen eye on the hosting performance on a regular basis. It is only when you understand how the CPU, RAM and Storage is performing at any given point, can you make a decision to add or remove resources to your hosting. If this is not done properly, you may end up paying for Cloud resources that you do not use or push the website to run on insufficient resources.
It would be great if the Cloud Hosting provider gives you cPanel access to a dashboard that allows you to monitor resource utilization on your Cloud Hosting plan and allocate additional CPU/RAM on demand.
Cloud Migration Support: When you are migrating between two Clouds or if you are migrating your cPanel from Shared or any other hosting to the Cloud, things can go wrong. Cloud Hosting migration involves computing environments that run differently than your current system. Servers, networks and data services all run and interact differently, and you need to make sure you update parts of your system to be ready for this change. It would be ideal if you have technical support from your Cloud Hosting service provider when it comes to migration to ensure things happen smoothly.
Having such services will definitely help you build a better foundation for your website and be ready to scale up as your business grows. Apart from these features, if there are any other Cloud Hosting features that hosting providers should look at, feel free to mention them in the comments section below!
