If you own or manage an online service or resource, then I am asking you to do this little experiment. Imagine that your online service is perfect, ideal, that it works flawlessly, quickly directing your users to the services or products you offer and easily helping them buy it. Your customers never find your website being down or slow, even during the sales season. So, they come back to buy more, and recommend your website to their friends. Amazing picture! But in reality, is it completely true for your online store or service?
If you can improve your online service, do it!
In my practice, too many times I have seen the following. I know that a certain online service can work better, I see that it slows down when I browse through the catalog, I even notice the website being completely down occasionally. However, the owners are satisfied with the performance of their website. I think the reason is that, probably, we all are so used to putting up with this world’s imperfections, that we just don’t notice them anymore. However, overlooking flaws in our online services can cost us thousands of dollars in the income we otherwise would receive.
Tech can never be perfect, it has limits, it breaks, it glitches. Yes, but virtual servers that you get in a cloud hosting can boost the quality of your service. Cloud solutions have fewer limits and are more reliable. Architecture with Auto Scaling can grow its power many times within seconds. So, you can build a perfect service in the cloud, and perfection will certainly pay off.
Will cloud hosting cost more?
Maybe yes, maybe no. It depends on how big your system is, how many visitors your website has, and other factors. If you have a decent number of users and the website load differs greatly depending on the time and season, marketing campaigns, and is constantly growing, then using highly-scalable cloud architecture will definitely be a smart choice.
You might be better off with a physical hosting if you have roughly the same amount of customers using your service at any time, you don’t experience big jumps in the load on your servers, and don’t expect the number of users to grow significantly.
The benefits of the cloud
There are many benefits, I’ll name just a few of them:
- Auto Scaling – if you use Auto Scaling architecture, the number of servers you have will automatically change all the time according to the traffic.
- Economical – you are paying only for what you use, as Auto Scaling allows you to have at each moment only as much server power as you actually need.
- Easy and quick – you can order and receive servers within seconds.
- Reliable – thanks to the cloud architecture, the failover is already built into the system, which ensures that problems with hardware in a cloud hosting will not be critical to your system.
Case study: how AWS Auto Scaling cloud architecture works
Let us see how cloud architecture with AWS Auto Scaling works. I’ll use the real example of our client’s heavy-load online store that we successfully migrated to AWS last year.
Auto Scaling generates the exact server power needed to handle the user traffic at each moment. So, we see that on an ordinary day, the number of the system servers at night is around 7, while in the day time it grows to up to 30 and reaches its peaks of about 45 servers. Whereas on the day of a Mega-sale the maximum number of servers generated with Auto Scaling was about 150.
To order and receive a server in physical hosting you usually need to wait for weeks. So, you see that without Auto Scaling, using physical hosting, the online store would need to pay for the maximum server power all the time keeping those servers for the times of traffic peaks.
Did the use of 150 servers cost too much? Relatively no, because they were added just for the time when they were needed, so they only brought back more revenue. Because of Auto Scaling and other cost-optimization techniques, on Black Friday, the hosting cost for the day was equal to 0,05% compared to the day’s revenue.
Conclusion: when perfect is not the enemy of good
Online service is one of the areas, where aiming for perfection brings great results. So, if you see now that your online resource or service can perform better, aim for the stars! Remember that improvements in the performance of your website or application will increase your income and support the growth of your company.
If your business is already in the cloud, there is always room for improvement.
If you are not in the cloud yet, chances are migration to the cloud is the next step you need to take on your road of success.
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