As cloud hosting becomes viable for more and more companies, the decision comes down to benefits the organization will see from the platform. The decision should come at the application and service level. Cloud hosting provides customers virtual machines that provide a finite amount of resources for the cost. In this example, we will look at the advantages of virtualizing LA web hosting by moving it to the cloud.

Security – To get the benefits of virtualization, all sub services need to operate in their virtual machines. In the case of web hosting, the web server should run on its server while other services like DNS, SQL will run on other virtual machines. If and when there is a security breach of one VM, the others remain unaffected.

Migration – You can also migrate, update or upgrade one component without affecting any of the others. Let’s say you want to change from MySQL to Postgres, then all you need to do is bring up a new VM, set up the new database server. When the installation is complete, point the web server to the new database server and shutdown the old VM.

Backup – Keeping backups of applications and data is critical. With virtualization, you can take snapshots or backups of entire VM’s. Cloud hosting providers like Rack Alley have hundreds of servers around the world. You can create geographical redundancy by keeping backup VM’s in other countries.

Load – A sudden surge in traffic could cripple your entire website when all the systems are running on the same server. When you have individual VM’s, only the web server will take the hit. At that point, you can either increase resources or bring up additional VM’s to handle the load.

Written by Rack Alley

One of the reasons many organizations opt for LA colocation is growth. In house data centers and server rooms only have so much capacity. This capacity often falls behind requirements and this can affect the growth prospects of the company. In some cases, it can adversely affect outlook if service levels dip below customer expectations. Using a LA data center service provider allows an organization to let someone else handle power, cooling, networking, security has advantages to the bottom line. Here are some tips for preparing to make the move to a third party data center:

Sizing

Colocation, at its most basic level, is the rental of your provider’s infrastructure. While there are many other considerations, you want provision only as much space and resources as you need. It is wise to assume some growth, but any expansion can be undertaken later. Avoid under-provisioning in a bid to keep costs low.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is a resource that you should provision with care. There is no point in paying for too much bandwidth in anticipation of traffic spikes. The better move is to negotiate an allowance for bursts during peak load times. Even the burst can be limited to prevent cost overruns.

Business

Supporting a business requires careful coordination of IT decisions with the business side of the company. The primary reason we make infrastructure changes is to support the growth of the enterprise. The business side will provide valuable information such as regulatory requirements that should be part of the decision.

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Rack Alley is a provider of server hosting Los Angeles at their LA data center.