When choosing a hosting solution, scalability has become increasingly vital for growing businesses. However, companies don’t just need growing room, they also need access to those resources quickly and a solution that is cost-effective. In this post, we examine the importance of scalability and explain why virtual servers are the most effective solution.
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The importance of scalability
Scalability is the ability to add additional computing resources to deal with changes in demand. If a business has limited resources and demand outpaces capacity, then there can be significant issues: websites and applications can crash, and operations can grind to a standstill. We’ve all seen reports of major websites going offline on Black Friday because they have too many visitors for their servers to handle. Not only can this kind of issue cause a substantial loss of sales; it can also do a great deal of damage to brand reputations.
As peaks in demand can come unexpectedly for growing businesses, aside from the capacity to scale up, companies also need to be able to do it quickly. If a social media post goes viral and visitors start flocking to your website, it is vital to have the resources to take advantage of all that new traffic. The last thing you need is to see your website go offline midway through the rush.
When it comes to scaling up, different hosting solutions present different challenges. With shared hosting and VPS hosting, it is possible to upgrade to a larger hosting solution fairly quickly, provided it is with the same hosting provider. Migrating to a different host can take considerably longer and may involve a period of downtime. With dedicated servers, upgrading capacity requires either hardware upgrades or moving to a more powerful server solution – both of which take time. You can scale horizontally with both VPS and a dedicated server by purchasing an additional server, but again, setting these up is not going to help with unexpected demand, it only ensures there is greater capacity for future workloads.
The other issue with these forms of scaling is the cost. Moving to a bigger plan, upgrading servers or purchasing additional servers are all long-term financial commitments. If you do not need those additional resources all the time, then a permanent upgrade could be a waste of money. If you have added an extra £200 a month to your dedicated server bill for capacity you may only use two or three times a year, such an upgrade might not provide the best value for money.
Discover what you can do with a virtual server, read: 6 Ways Businesses Use Cloud Computing
The advantages of virtual servers
Virtual servers or cloud servers offer a far more suitable scalability option for growing businesses. Created by hypervisor virtualisation software, each virtual server is hosted across a network of interlinked physical machines in a data centre. This means that, unlike other forms of hosting, virtual servers are not limited by the capacity of a single physical machine, instead, they can access the resources of thousands of physical servers.
The benefits of this in practice are that, for a relatively low monthly fee, you can purchase a basic cloud hosting plan with CPU, RAM and storage resources suitable for your everyday needs; however, if you need additional resources beyond the basic plan, these can be procured, on demand, on a pay-as-you-go basis. This flexibility ensures businesses can always cope with unexpected traffic peaks or carry out intermittent high-demand workloads, like batch processing. Today, you can add additional resources instantly, either at the click of a button within your control panel or through auto-scaling, ensuring that whatever the demand, your business is not left in the lurch. In terms of how far you can scale up, given the incredible capacity of data centres, there is virtually no limit to the additional resources you can access.
Virtual server scalability also has important financial benefits for growing businesses that need to manage their budgets wisely. Scaling up only when required ensures that pay-as-you-go costs are kept to a minimum, so there is no unnecessary overspending as there would be by permanently upgrading to a bigger physical server or larger hosting plan. Some businesses have used this to considerable advantage. For instance, go henry, the children’s payment card provider, uses its virtual servers to scale up every morning when parents are most active topping up their children’s accounts, and then scales down again once the busy period has come to an end. This kind of agility ensures it has the capacity to handle its daily peaks while keeping its overall costs low.
Not sure which is the right option? Read: Dedicated Server or Cloud Hosting – Choosing the Right Solution
Benefits beyond scalability
Another key benefit of virtual servers is that because they are independent of the interlinked physical servers they are hosted on, they can be moved around from one physical machine to another. Should there be an issue with one physical server, this means the virtual server can continue to operate on other servers without any loss of availability. As a result, websites and critical apps hosted in the cloud benefit from 100% uptime guarantees, something that cannot be achieved with any other form of hosting solution. What’s more, as hosting providers have multiple data centres spread across different geographical locations, it also means that if an entire data centre goes offline, the virtual server can continue to operate by being brought online at a different data centre. For growing businesses that need reliability from their hosting, virtual servers are unrivalled.
In today’s market, growing businesses will need to take advantage of the latest developments in technology, such as big data analytics, automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the latest sector-focused solutions, like FinTech, MedTech and AgTech. As these technologies are invariably created for use within the cloud, businesses with virtual servers are best placed to make use of them as they can be deployed swiftly and are fully compatible with cloud infrastructure and virtual systems. With such infrastructure at their fingertips, growing businesses can easily utilise these advanced technologies to deliver new and better services, automate operations and implement efficiencies.
Find out how cloud hosting is advancing, read: AI and Web Hosting – a Match Made in the Cloud
Conclusion
For growing businesses looking to accommodate fluctuating IT demands in a cost-efficient way, virtual servers are the most effective hosting solution currently available. While the flexibility to scale up or down on demand ensures there is always the capacity to deal with traffic spikes, the pay-as-you-go pricing helps keep costs to a minimum. At the same time, businesses benefit from high availability and the ability to deploy at speed.
Looking for a virtual server that comes with managed services, 24/7 technical support and advanced security built-in? Check out our virtual cloud servers.
