Last weekend, after a few beers on the deck, a friend of mine started asking questions about cloud computing. The project he was working on had begun to grow exponentially, and he needed a solution which would allow him to make seamless upgrades and keep pace with his site’s increasing traffic.

After an hour of arguing about the possible solutions and options available, I realized that I’d found a topic for a new article—if my friend wasn’t sure about the reliability of cloud hosting (that’s what we were really arguing about), I thought there must be other people out there who had questions about it as well.

Cloud computing makes some people nervous because the technology is offered as a web-access application or service which leaves the user unaware of the architecture inside the cloud. For people who are used to seeing how everything works, this can be a little uncomfortable, but I see it as an advantage rather than a disadvantage. After all, if you don’t have to worry about how your server works, you’ll have more time to actually use it, right?

The fact is, cloud computing not only saves time and money, it’s the best way to ensure reliable hosting for your site. There are several service options available to make sure the cloud is always serving your project and doing what you need it to do.

One set of reliability controls involves passive and active backup, in which site content and OS settings are backed up on a pre-determined schedule (passive backup) or on the fly (active backup). Active backup tends to be more expensive, as it requires extra resources to be dedicated for backup processing.

The real value of cloud hosting, in terms of reliability, comes in the form of dashboards which display the status of your cloud nodes, and which your provider’s personnel monitor 24×7. In the event of a node failure, the failover protection system disables the failed node, and all controls are delegated to a backup node. Even in a worst-case scenario, the master-backup delegation is usually complete within a matter of minutes. But since your cloud hosting provider is monitoring node performance at all times, the operators usually become aware of issues before an actual failure, and failover measures can be initiated well in advance—this narrows the minutes down to seconds and all but eliminates disruption for end users.

To sum it up, if you’re concerned about the reliability of your website, I can’t think of a better option than cloud computing. Compared to purchasing backups and failover protection on a dedicated server, cloud hosting is more cost-effective and less disruptive for your clients and for yourself. If you need a little more convincing, let me know, and maybe we can discuss it over a couple of beers.

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