One of the key benefits of cloud computing is having the ability to scale your infrastructure on-demand. Cloud scalability gives the user the ability to provide more and less computing resources when needed. A managed service provider hosting platform will typically scale-up, scale out, and scale in; this is sometimes referred to as vertical and horizontal scaling.

Choosing a hosting provider that offers such solutions will help your organization grow seamlessly, whether your business model expects to grow rapidly or steadily over time. Scaling introduces more affordable options for the desired web solutions. Scalability gives companies countless options when it comes to meeting the demand for computing resources.

What Is Scalable Cloud Hosting?

When computing resources can be scaled, they add a unique layer of flexibility to businesses that experience unexpected growth. Scalability also gives the ability to decrease on-demand services too, with many businesses scaling back resources out of hours and over weekends to introduce cost savings.

Here are some examples of scalable hosting solutions:

  • Scale Up: Scaling up adds additional resources to cloud applications. This typically involves adding extra virtual private servers (VPS) to a virtual cluster. The cluster of multiple servers usually sits behind an application load balancer that operates on a round-robin to send user requests to different servers in the cluster. This greatly improves the application’s bandwidth and offers a seamless experience to the user.
  • Scale-Out: Scaling out keeps the same server, but adds resources to the existing configuration. This is usually the first step businesses will take to improve performance. Additional CPU, Disk Space, and Memory are added to improve performance.
  • Scale In: Scaling in is the opposite of scaling out; resources on the same server are reduced when not needed. Scaling in usually results in downtime and the VPS will always need to be rebuilt. In most circumstances, it is more beneficial to destroy the existing server and rebuild it from a snapshot or backup.

How Does Scalable Cloud Hosting Work?

Vertical and horizontal scalable hosting service plans are designed to either distribute server load between additional servers or by upgrading the existing virtual server. As a result, if the website is experiencing more visitors and traffic than normal, additional resources can be deployed to endure the increased traffic.

Scalability ensures your website will always be up and running. Scaling introduces significant cost savings, making it much more affordable than other types of hosting. Scalable hosting plans are ideal for growing businesses, and there is no need to speed big on more expensive hosting plans or purchase additional hardware. Scaled hosting services can be adapted as you grow, and you can even make the transition to a cloud-hosted dedicated physical server when the time is right.

The services that can be scaled vary from provider to provider. Choosing a cloud provider that offers scalable hosting will allow you to add more SSD storage/block storage disk space, RAM, CPU, and bandwidth at any time. Additional resources are added by creating new cloud instances or by using the provider’s hosting plans. Hosting plans are available for general-purpose instances, storage-optimized, memory-optimized, and compute-optimized plans. Extra resources are available via the provider’s cloud control panel.

Configuring software-defined auto-scaling offers additional protection and immediate access to pre-provisioned virtual machine resources. Auto-scaling load balancing will handle any unexpected traffic spikes or loads on the server. Software-defined auto-scaling is an automatic process. It works by defining specific parameters, for example, a CPU metric that alerts if the server load is sustained at over 95% for 15 minutes; once this parameter is met, auto-scaling will kick in. The software will allocate pre-defined additional resources to meet the increase in traffic and usage on your website.

What Is Cloud Web Hosting?

Cloud Hosting is typically the provisioning of a Virtual Private Server (VPS) upon a cloud provider’s infrastructure. It is a viable alternative to dedicated server hosting and empowers the user to take advantage of the latest cloud technology backed by redundant systems.

Many clients prefer VPS for hosting to a physical machine because they get the same full root access and administrative server control as they would with a dedicated machine without incurring the additional costs associated with running a dedicated environment.

What sets cloud hosting apart from old-fashioned VPSes is the speed, agility, reliability, and affordability of a cloud VPS. Cloud hosting services interconnect with existing cloud computing infrastructure, providing managed services such as managed backups and managed KMS, not to mention the availability of around-the-clock technical support.

Cloud hosting works through customized virtualization technology that splits the vendor’s physical servers into multiple virtual machines. Virtual machines are called cloud VPS servers and have access to the provider’s cloud network, making it super simple to host a website.

Key Features

Cloud Hosting is extremely popular and the industry is growing rapidly. This is because of the key features on offer that include:

Guaranteed Resources: The best Cloud VPS providers guarantee system resources without the need for a dedicated host. If you purchase a plan with 4 vCPU and 8GB of Memory, that is exactly what you get. The hosting provider carves up host resources and locks them to your VPS.

Additional Managed Services: Cloud VPS platforms include high availability configurations and access to other Cloud Services such as onsite and offsite daily backups, snapshots, and secure block storage.

Additional Managed Security: Take advantage of a comprehensive suite of managed security features including DDoS protection, a secure content delivery network, encrypted SSH access, and more.

Managed Security: Cloud VPS servers are built into stringent security best practices. All servers have root access (or Windows Administrator) privileges enabled and available upon launch. Choose a Cloud Hosting provider that combines simplicity, security, and scalability with the reliability of the latest virtualization and cloud hosting platform technology.

Scalability: Scale-up resources when needed, and only pay for what is used. The pay-as-you-go model used in cloud hosting gives users the flexibility to cancel at any time with no commitments, saving you significant time and money.

One-Click Applications: Choose your Operating System, Application, and disk space configuration using automation. Simply select what you want and the system resources needed, then hit deploy. If you need to scale up, simply snapshot your server, upgrade your hosting plan and recover the snapshot. The entire process takes no time at all.

Cloud Hosting Benefits

The hosting provider manages the entire cloud stack, relinquishing the need for an on-site IT department or experienced developers to manage and maintain it, empowering the customer to focus on using the platform. The provider is responsible for software provisioning, security patching, and any issues encountered while also achieving a 100% service level agreement and high performance throughout the host infrastructure.

High availability: The provider’s core infrastructure is created in a highly redundant and high availability setup. The provider’s data center facilities will feature a minimum of N+1 availability, this includes at least dual power feeds, generator backup, and redundant bandwidth from multiple comms providers. Block Storage service is fail-safe, providing RAID10 protection in the disk layer, but also RAID protection in the infrastructure management layer.

Scalable solutions: Add resources to business services at a moment’s notice, giving your users more power and more control over cloud resources. Add resources to scale on-demand directly from the provider’s management website.

Traffic load balancing: Ensure your website and network resources are consistently available regardless of demand.

Faster performance: Even basic VPS servers offer fantastic performance for your company. Only the latest hardware is used, and host policies ensure that each host is never overloaded, altogether making for happy customers and a great user experience.

Affordable prices: Cost is a major focus for business finances, so it’s important to choose not only an affordable cloud company but also one that provides great service and support to its customers.

24x7x365 Support: Choose a hosting business that will provide advice and support around the clock.

Conclusion

In this post, we explained what scalable hosting is and how you can achieve business growth with it. If you want to get scalable web hosting for your website, you can try out Atlantic.Net‘s cloud platform.

Atlantic.Net has more than 30 years of experience in the web hosting industry and currently serves customers in over 100 countries from eight global data center regions in London, New York, Ashburn, Orlando, Dallas, San Francisco, Singapore, and Toronto.

Over the last 30 years, we have consistently grown our digital footprint, allowing us to evolve as a technology leader trusted by thousands of businesses. We pride ourselves on the dedication and commitment of our workforce who have traveled with us on this incredible journey.

We have weathered three recessions and are currently in a strong position to face the latest expected financial depression, thanks to our sound business principles and focus on growing a profitable company, with little to no debt.

We have been developing world-class facilities and adapting and changing our business processes throughout our history. As a result, our customer base has continued to grow rapidly, year on year. We help businesses around the world master their technology requirements and realize their digital transformation vision for today and the future.

Our technology and dynamic support teams are what make Atlantic.Net stand out from the competition. The credit goes to our engineers, who have designed, created, and now support the cloud infrastructure 24x7x365. Their dedicated work keeps our servers, secure blob storage, network interconnects, and managed service offerings running to the highest of standards.

We partner with global leaders in the cloud infrastructure procurement industry, allowing us to create an infrastructure that not only outperforms the competition in real-world testing but offers 100% uptime guarantees, great value, and a satisfying ROI.

Atlantic.Net is a trusted hosting provider that delivers excellent uptime, robust security features, and reliable customer support. In addition, all its hosting plans are scalable and can help your website grow.

Need help with Scalable Cloud Hosting?

Atlantic.Net can help with all your cloud hosting needs!

Whether you need a scalable cloud hosting platform or a customized dedicated solution; Atlantic.Net stands ready to help you craft a scalable and affordable solution for you. When it comes to security and compliance, Atlantic.Net has got you covered too with HIPAA hosting and PCI-ready hosting. For more information, please email [email protected]

About HostAdvice

HostAdvice is a hosting solutions comparison engine that offers expert comparisons on web hosting providers based on unbiased user reviews. Since 2014, they have received over 65,000 user reviews and have written more than 4,000 expert reviews, and those numbers are growing every day. They also help businesses and individuals find a hosting solutions provider that best suits their needs and offers the best prices and reliability. Their experts also provide all kinds of how-to articles and guides on numerous tech-related topics that you can read on their website whenever you want.