By now I’m sure you have heard about the latest buzzword in the world of web, Cloud Computing. What is it? It sounds expensive? Can it benefit my Site?
Quite simply the cloud metaphor is used to describe a collection of physical computers that appear as one large computer. Cloud computing offers many services but what we’ll be talking about today are the benefits to high traffic websites.
Most websites are typically hosted on a single physical server. This is fine for most sites, the situation changes when the site experiences large volumes of traffic. This traffic if not carefully monitored can cause some issues.
1. If the server and data centre that is hosting your site doesn’t have the required resources it could lead to the site dropping offline, due to the server being unable to handle all the requests.
As you can imagine this is a potential disaster. You could be receiving higher then normal traffic due to an ad campaign, and all of a sudden the thousands of users trying to get to your site get greeted with something like this:
In this situation the cloud could help eleviate the strain on your server by offloading all the large rich media files. So when people visit your website the small HTML page is requested from your server and the larger images and videos are requested from the cloud.
2. When a site gets a large amount of traffic as in the situation described above, generally your hosting bandwidth will get used very quickly. Once you have used all the bandwidth included in your hosting package most web hosting companies will charge an excess data charge. This can very in price up to as high as $100 per GB. If not closely monitored you could end up with quite a large bill on top of your normal hosting charges.
In comparison cloud storage bandwidth charges can be as low as 30 cents per GB. So not only are you keeping your website operational by using the cloud you are also keeping your monthly hosting cost under control.
So is hosting in the cloud right for your website? If your site receives a large amount of traffic and hosts large images, audio or video it is a possible that cloud storage could help keep your website scalable for the future, while keeping your hosting to a minimum.
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