Cloud hosting provides businesses with greater freedom, power, reliability and scalability. However, not all solutions are created equal. Today, we’ll break down requirements for a legitimate Cloud setup that will take your online business to the next level.

What Constitutes a Trustworthy Cloud Solution?

True Cloud Technology
Enterprise level vendors like Rackspace are trusted as pioneers in the space, so be cautious of upstart hosting providers that promise the world but do not have the clients or experience to back up their claims.

 24/7 Support
While top notch providers offer a full suite of automated admin tools that circumvent the need to speak with customer reps, emergencies do happen. In the event of a major meltdown, you’ll need piece of mind that tech support is on-call around the clock.

Rapid Elasticity
Self-service “cloud creation” tools will facilitate easy adjustment or creation of resources, without needing to contact tech support staff. This becomes critical when immediate changes need to be made and there’s little time to spare.

Resource Pooling
A critical aspect of resource pooling is “load balancing”, or spreading website traffic across two or more web servers. Load balancing needs are a case-by-case basis but are typically required for sites with high traffic volume (e.g. 100,000 visitors per month) or that facilitate heavy downloading  or streaming of data (e.g. video).

Admin Tools & Automation
All enterprise level hosting companies have intuitive administration panels that allows customers to manage all aspects of their account. This is critical to any company with an IT staff responsible for maintaining its website.

Self Healing Features
The term “self healing” refers to the ability for a Cloud system to automatically recover from hardware failures. This is important because waiting for humans to fix hardware malfunctions can result in downtime that most businesses can’t aford.

Resource Visibility
Established hosting companies will provide access to an admin panel where customers can view their resource usage (e.g. bandwidth usage, etc.). IT staff can use these tools to keep an eye on usage, which is an indicator of whether or not adjustments need to be made to account for more/less traffic or data consumption.

On-Demand Self Service
A great feature that has been implemented by best-in-class hosting providers, is automatic account and service updates. This means you can simply make adjustments in the admin panel and they take effect without having to wait for a customer representative.