Cloud hosting: Solutions to support the growth of your e-commerce site

The question of data hosting arises throughout the life of the company. At the time of its creation, the least expensive solution is often preferred, but gradually the needs and the level of requirement evolve.

A need that is sometimes poorly identified

The e-commerce site is the company’s showcase: it is a transactional contact point that we must treat with care. He is the driving force behind the business. Its availability is, therefore, an essential element, to choose for a hosting strategist. The host, which is more of a partner than a simple server provider, supports the company’s growth.  You entrust it with your data and in a way the heart of her business. However, often, when we talk about accommodation, the first criterion of choice is the price. It is vital, but it would be more reasonable to reason in ROI (return on investment).

We need to question our real needs to choose the right host: take a look at our criteria and requirements but also at our internal skills. It is critical to ask the level of commitment: the SLA (Service Level Agreement) and the GTR (Recovery Time Guarantee). It involves defining the availability objective and the means implemented by the supplier in the event of an incident. How and how long does it take to guarantee a return to work (PRA, PCA)? What about data recovery? How often do backups occur?….. These elements will make it possible to determine the most appropriate solution, which meets all the defined criteria, without compromising profitability. Good knowledge of your needs makes it easier to choose.

Public, private, hybrid cloud… Hard to choose

Nowadays, the trend has been towards the Cloud, presented as an ideal solution, but there is no consensus on it. Indeed, despite its undeniable contributions such as flexibility and elasticity, the public cloud does not yet wholly reassure IT Departments. They criticize these offers, even if they evolve, for the lack of guarantees, particularly in terms of performance, security, integrity, and reversibility.

To overcome the limitations of the public cloud, many providers offer to mix it with the private cloud.  This hybrid cloud makes it possible to get the most out of everyone. The advantage of this solution is that it takes advantage of the flexibility and responsiveness of the public cloud while benefiting from the security and performance of a private cloud. It allows you to deploy front-ends and application servers in the public cloud quickly and at the same time secure your most sensitive data (e. g. the database) by hosting them in a private cloud at a specialized hosting provider that will guarantee a level of SLA adapted to the business. However, this requires a good knowledge of its infrastructure but also the technical skills to identify the most critical data to isolate them.

On paper, the hybrid cloud is tempting; the customer benefits from the best of both worlds. In practice, wanting to manage these different parameters yourself can quickly become a real headache. It raises new issues such as bandwidth management, inter-site latency or legal matters. It requires technical and organizational skills. It is necessary to manage two or more environments with different characteristics, in two very different places, and often with various interlocutors.

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