Over the previous year, your online business has grown and now it requires high server costs. The load on your website is jumping up and down. During the hours of increased customer activity, advertising campaigns and discounts, the load on the site increases by 10-20 times, then sometimes it drops to a minimum. Maintenance and support of the server system bring a lot of trouble, but still, the system periodically crashes.
If you are not in the cloud yet
If your system is not operating in the cloud hosting that uses automatic scaling of resources, you are probably paying for servers that you don’t use most of the time, and your system administrators are trying to estimate the planned load in advance to avoid a site crash. Moving to cloud hosting will allow you to solve many problems and relieve yourself of the extra work, will make it possible for you to effectively organize your online business, make it more reliable and provide growth opportunities.
Why AWS
Now we have a variety of cloud services, such as GCP (Google Cloud Platform), Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean, and others. They are largely similar, but there are market leaders that have proven in practice their high reliability. Why we are considering AWS:
- Amazon Web Services was the first cloud hosting, it started operating back in 2004 and has remained the leader ever since.
- AWS offers its customers about a hundred different useful services, including database tools, various utilities, cloud services for working with Big Data, and others.
- AWS uses only high-quality equipment and provides a high level of customer support.
Advantages and disadvantages of AWS
What advantages and disadvantages do you encounter when using cloud services? Let us consider the various features of AWS in detail, it is worth noting that AWS has many favorable points, which attracts users.
Rapid server deployment is the revolutionary capability of cloud hostings. While it may take days or even weeks to order a physical server, you can order and receive a cloud server within one minute.
Auto-scaling is one of the main advantages of cloud hostings and, in particular, AWS. The provider automatically monitors the growth of load on your servers, increasing or decreasing capacities according to the parameters you set and the current load on the system. Thus, you do not need to order servers in advance taking into account possible maximum loads and you pay only for the servers that you use. This provides up to 70% cost savings compared to ordering physical servers. Auto-scaling is especially useful for owners of online stores, marketplaces, and other services that are characterized by large jumps in the system load.
No need to monitor the physical state of the servers – the servers that you rent in the cloud are virtually always functional for you. AWS service carries out continuous work on monitoring and maintenance of equipment, this work is hidden from the end-users and allows them to focus on solving business problems without wasting time and money on monitoring the physical parameters of servers.
Fault tolerance through the use of geographically separated data centers. AWS has placed its data centers in many countries on different continents. You can choose where your servers will be located. Using different regions, you will further ensure the fault tolerance of your system. If, for example, one data center experiences temporary technical problems, then, at the same time, your servers in another territorial zone will be available and will ensure uninterrupted operation of your service.
Price – a disadvantage and advantage. At first glance, the cost of AWS services seems high, but a closer look reveals that in most cases Amazon is a profitable solution. It is worth noting that you can not directly compare the cost of a physical and cloud server since they are different in their parameters and capabilities. AWS virtual servers differ and are optimized according to the type of tasks performed, so they accomplish their particular tasks easier than physical servers with a standard configuration, so the number of virtual and physical servers needed will differ.
Also, with AWS, you can apply many cost-saving methods, such as auto-scaling, using various types of instances, economical subscription options, and more.
The absence of the need for monitoring and solving problems with hardware will also reduce costs.
It is worth noting that using AWS you pay for the high quality of service. The standards of this service are to use the most reliable equipment and a high level of customer support.
Cloud services. AWS provides users with a variety of useful services. For example, tools for working with Big Data allow owners of Big Data to easily carry out analysis and statistical studies, that are difficult to perform using other technical tools
Binding to AWS Services. Using AWS servers, you will more and more begin to use different Amazon’s services and tools, as it is useful and convenient, and your technical solutions will become partially tied to this hosting. This forms the so-called vendor lock-in, and it will make it difficult for you to leave AWS. However, if your plans include long-term cooperation, then this bind will affect your business positively. However, in this case, it will be difficult but still possible for you to move from AWS if you decide to change cloud hosting. Most hosting providers have vendor lock-in properties in their operation, and it is often not possible to avoid being tied to the provider.
Our AWS experience
For more than 8 years, our clients have been using AWS. We work with busy online stores and highly reliable financial services. Auto-scaling allows us to successfully withstand 10-time jumps in the load on the system, and ensuring fault-tolerance allows us to achieve 99.99% uptime for financial services with a system response time of 0.01 seconds. We have performed successful migrations of different systems to AWS without the downtime of the services and with the help of optimization, we can reduce server fees by 60%.
Looking for additional information?
We will be happy to answer your questions and give recommendations on how to improve your services, choose a hosting and perform a migration.
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