Moving your website to the cloud can be a challenging task owing to the multiple misconceptions prevailing about Cloud Hosting. But if your Cloud Hosting service provider is committed to simplifying things for you, it can surely be a smooth sailing move. However, choosing the right web hosting service provider is a challenge in itself. With a lot of options in the market, it is imperative that you correctly assess your requirements before selecting the right one. Conducting a little research and exploring the right set of questions to ask your potential service provider can be of great help in this situation.
Here are 6 questions you can ask your potential Cloud Hosting provider:
- How is data loss dealt with?
One of the most important aspects of Cloud Hosting is the preservation of data. While selecting your Cloud Hosting provider, you must definitely ask questions about the data redundancies in place. What are the backup processes? Can you retrieve the lost data? If yes, then how? - Where and how will my data be stored?
The next big concern is the security of your data and other vital information. As a customer, you must know the location of your service provider’s data centre and how safe your data is there. What are the laws and regulations that govern the storage of data in that particular place? How strongly is the data centre protected against any theft, disaster or failure? What are the data storage solutions employed? Are there any backup data centres as well in case of failure of the primary centre? - What are the post-sale services offered?
One thing that makes any service provider stand out is the post-sale services and customer support they offer. You would expect your service provider to acknowledge and resolve your queries within the shortest possible TAT. Having a skilled contact person available to you 24*7 would be a great add-on. For this, the responsibilities need to be clearly defined and communicated. For example, in a fully Managed Cloud Hosting, the service provider is completely responsible for server maintenance, updates, other back-end processes, etc. - Is there any flexibility in pricing?
Cloud Hosting services generally come with a pre-fixed plan. Most of the companies have several variants of these plans to suit the business needs of the customer. However, focusing too much on a fixed or discounted price may end up in a compromise on the support end. Though infrastructure is the focus of all deals, services and conflict resolution is an important part as well. - Is the plan scalable?
With the increasing business and customer base, your requirement for hosting resources will also increase. In such a case, you would want an option that is scalable and allows you to scale up your resources with a single click. Also, is there any downtime associated if you wish to scale up or change the existing plan? - Is there an uptime guarantee?
Lastly and most importantly, you must ask your service provider for their uptime guarantee. Uptime is crucial to your business’ existence online. A Cloud Hosting provider that is backed by reliable servers and a robust network is a good choice. An ideal uptime guarantee can be anything above 99.5{373ef3030c12d1bfb606757904bd0b23869624e49aa3cbb849a44e3d15efee00}.
Conclusion
Selecting the best Cloud Hosting provider is crucial and significant to the progress of your business. Security, high uptime and scalability in terms of resource plan selection are a few important considerations to be made while selecting the right hosting provider.