Cloud hosting customers are facing many difficult questions and choices when they try to choose from the different cloud computing service providers operating in the market. If you are a web hosting provider then you already know that the very concept of making use of cloud computing for replacing or augmenting the IT infrastructure still remains very new.
Back in 2006, when AWS came into the picture, it could very well be considered as the starting point of the cloud revolution. At present, we are in the second half of 2014 and all big guns like IBM, OpenStack, HP, and Google have all got their own turns to discuss their respective personal cloud offerings. This actually is a great time for a web hosting provider to notice what changes are going on in the cloud arena; let us take a quick look at 5 of them.
- Transparency: Even though the cloud technology is very simple, it can be tricky to figure out the pricing; even though it appears like it is very simple to solve. Big cloud vendors in the market are quite open about their price slicing but there also always remains a lot of room for CIOs to figure out well in advance what they will pay.
- brid Cloud: The concept behind this is simple; mashing up you on-premise applications with off-premise cloud services and the net result is hybrid cloud. You get resources that can be scaled out with demand; at least this is what the big vendors say. At present, hybrid cloud means nothing but a mixture of SaaS application and in-house application for sales force management, payroll and human resources.
- Compatibility Issues: Google, Microsoft and Amazon all have their own version of cloud computing. A company like OpenStack, which guarantees one common core, has many vendors that offer different branches of the core. Choosing the right cloud vendor still remains a very tricky decision that’s hard to reverse, especially if the relationship continues to get sour.
- Smaller/Regional Clouds: Initially, cloud computing was primarily based on making big data centers and then finally pulling enough number of customers for making the investment worthwhile. Customers today are also more concerned as to where their data is stored; this was not the case few days ago. Country-by-country cloud computing may not look very practical or most efficient in terms of scaling up, but it still remains to be most effective option of generating newer customers as well as retaining the older ones.
As a cloud provider, you need to accept the downsides of the technology, and still make the most out of it by promoting its selling point, and as a customer, you need to accept it, despite knowing some of its downsides, because the advantages clearly outweigh its drawbacks.
