What do you look for in a Cloud provider?

What are the best features that you need from a cloud and why cloud hosting makes you move to it? price? support? flexibility? uptime?

Paul Wellner Bou said:

What are the best features that you need from a cloud and why cloud hosting makes you move to it? price? support? flexibility? uptime?

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I heard more about its uptime, it could give your hosting 99.99% uptime but I'm not sure about this because I can not check it is cloud or traditional VPS.

Paul Wellner Bou said:

What are the best features that you need from a cloud and why cloud hosting makes you move to it? price? support? flexibility? uptime?

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In my personal opinion, I would go with a cloud hosting service because it has scalable, network features, dedicated resources and better uptime.
for any cloud plans I can increase disk space but I don't see any options to decrease disk usage since it will cause data loss?

There are several things you require your cloud provider to offer apart from flexibility and uptime. They are as below -

The delivery process of the services you are planning to buy.
Is it the real cloud provider you are dealing with or is your service provider a reseller?
Type of hardware being utilized to provide quality service.
Operating of the platform by your service provider. Check if you get the resources without fighting for them. Or if you need to struggle how the situation is handled?
Location of your provider's hosting the service, whether it's in a data centre or in their own bedroom?
Where is their data centre based, in US or internationally?

PallaviG said:

Is it the real cloud provider you are dealing with or is your service provider a reseller?

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I am wondering how to check if a cloud provider is a cloud service or just a reseller?

PallaviG said:

Where is their data centre based, in US or internationally?

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I always choose US and EU location as my websites are targeting audiences there.

Hi Paul, it makes sense for anyone to migrate anything on the Cloud:
a) To make sure that the website, apps would use High Availability and the cloud instance would restart (and continue running with minor interruption of the services) on a different host part of the cloud infrastructure in case of it's own OS failure or a failure of the underlying physical host
b) Needs a Failover (fault tolerance) scenario, when web sites or apps would continue operating without interruption (not restart of the Cloud servers) in case of a any failure
c) Wants to scale up the computing resources at any time to handle a load

There might be other reasons, like to be billed per minute (or per hour) for example, despite that this sounds a bit weird

Paul Wellner Bou said:

I am wondering how to check if a cloud provider is a cloud service or just a reseller?

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It's pretty hard to resell cloud hosting as it's used by people with some knowledge in web hosting, and most of the cloud providers (linode, Vultr, digitalOcean) have their own network and repository to deliver all the software for their server.

So you have just to use a simple apt-get update/yum update to see what are the mirrors used to update your server.

HostColor said:

Hi Paul, it makes sense for anyone to migrate anything on the Cloud:
a) To make sure that the website, apps would use High Availability and the cloud instance would restart (and continue running with minor interruption of the services) on a different host part of the cloud infrastructure in case of it's own OS failure or a failure of the underlying physical host
b) Needs a Failover (fault tolerance) scenario, when web sites or apps would continue operating without interruption (not restart of the Cloud servers) in case of a any failure
c) Wants to scale up the computing resources at any time to handle a load

There might be other reasons, like to be billed per minute (or per hour) for example, despite that this sounds a bit weird

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A "Cloud Hosting" is not needed to have a high-availability or a complete fault tolerance with load-balancing. Most of users use cloud hosting because it provides the ability to setup this kind of setup for a affordable price. You can easily build a multi-server cluster for only few dollars with virtual servers.

But if you are using several cloud servers, it will quickly cost more than a good dedicated server. And you will be able to have the same level of availability by using a virtualization software on 2 dedicated servers than a cloud hosting. But this time the resources are dedicated and you will not be billed more if you use it 10 minutes or 30 days.

Hi VirtuBox, thanks for your comment However, I don't understand "Most of users use cloud hosting because it provides the ability to setup this kind of setup for a affordable price.", may you please elaborate?

Cloud computing is not about "affordability" and Cloud is not about any low cost computing service. It is about creating certain computing infrastructures and provide specific service on top of them. Scalability, load-balancing, High Availability, Failover are among those services.

I have a website that is built on Laravel and it is hosted on GCE through managed hosting platform, Cloudways. Some features of cloud hosting that are necessary: Scalability, support, uptime, CDN and ability to use different services as an addon. Since GCE's support is a paid package, I am using my platform's support which is free. Some addons I am using are: New Relic and Sucuri for monitoring and security.

Edit: Not CDN, but load balancing.

Hi @treefiddy, A CDN has a little to do with a Cloud computing as a service. Why would you say that it is among "Some features of cloud hosting that are necessary". CDN is a networking service.

Cloud hosting should of course add the advantages which come with it. It should have very high uptime and great stability with instant resource upgrade.
I would also make sure it is ran on SSD drives as any new host should run SSD.
The rest of the points are mostly mentioned above

I personally look for uptime and os because I prefer Linux and the uptime is important for me.

You look for for the uptime, Bandwidth and storage capacity.

Paul Wellner Bou said:

What are the best features that you need from a cloud and why cloud hosting makes you move to it? price? support? flexibility? uptime?

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In my personal opinion

Maybe by:

Uptime
Speed
flexibility
&
Support

Paul Wellner Bou said:

What are the best features that you need from a cloud and why cloud hosting makes you move to it? price? support? flexibility? uptime?

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For me the biggest advantage of the cloud is the flexibility (upgrade and downgrade resource), charge for hours and availability.

I think newbies are going to value support more than most, as well as enterprise-level companies who don't have a large IT staff.

The rest of those features should be standard from your provider and none of them should lack. The type of hosting you get can eliminate most problems with up-time. If I'm not mistaken, a VPS, for instance, will probably have less down time because of its nature. A shared hosting platform might have more downtime due to the other users on it and server stuffing.

The most important factors that I look for on a cloud hosting provider are:
1) Uptime
2) Reliability
3) Scalability
4) Support
5) Pricing of course

Cloud or VPS is more about:-

• Flexibility
• Scalability
• Rapid development
• Easy migration

hamzman said:

The most important factors that I look for on a cloud hosting provider are:
1) Uptime
2) Reliability
3) Scalability
4) Support
5) Pricing of course

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PaulAdam said:

Cloud or VPS is more about:-

• Flexibility
• Scalability
• Rapid development
• Easy migration

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Combining both factors in these 2 answers, I think we could have a perfect cloud hosting service. right?

According to me, following points should be considered when choosing cloud provider such as:
1. Pricing structure : You should pay only for those resources which are using.
2. How secure your cloud is : Security measures to look for multifactor user authentication and data encryption.
3. Customer services : You should inquiry about customer services.
4. Technical support : Does it providing technical support 24*7?
5. Scalability : You should look for its scalability because it matters a lot.
6. Uptime : Uptime is really prominent when your customers seek for information.