Cloud hosting has matured from an emerging IT trend into an absolute necessity for businesses looking to grow, scale, and build cost-efficiency. More organisations are adopting cloud architecture and migrating their services, moving away from slow, less adaptable and scalable systems.
This move is critical for software developers in SaaS and IT companies, who look beyond a rack space to store their files. Many are in the market for a combination of cloud hosting features that give them the flexibility, speed, and control needed to build, test, and deploy projects with ease. These businesses also want a cloud host for developers that fits with their development workflows.
So, what are the top features in the cloud that are an absolute must for your software development team?
Find out which 7 features make your choice the best cloud hosting platform for your developers.
1. Developer-Friendly Interface and Tools
You’ll want to offer your developers a cloud hosting platform that supports a developer-friendly interface and tools. With their intuitive dashboards that help in server deployment and monitoring, as well as APIs and CLI tools to automate tasks and integrate hosting, the cloud offers tools and interfaces that support your development workflows.
Popular IDE integrations in the cloud (e.g., VS Code extensions for Azure) improve productivity within development environments.
2. High Performance and Fast Loading Times
Speed and performance aren’t just for a better user experience; they’re vital for development too. Working on a sluggish server environment translates to longer testing times, delayed deployments, and frustration when your team is working with dynamic applications.
Developers frequently note frustration with high loading times, particularly during debugging. They deserve better than a sluggish server, and that’s where a cloud hosting with features meant for developers, including SSD storage, optimised caching, and high-speed infrastructure, can be incredibly beneficial for speeding up development.
3. Robust Security Measures
Security is another important feature to look for when you’re choosing your cloud with your developers in mind. You need robust and reliable security measures that protect your developers’ hard work and your business’s intellectual property. If your cloud hosting platform lacks firewalls, malware and ransomware scanning, or DDoS protection, your applications and data are at risk.
To reduce the likelihood of your site getting hacked or on the receiving end of a DDoS threat, you’ll want to choose a cloud platform with reliable SSL encryption, automated security patches, and proactive monitoring. BlackBox Hosting does just that: we protect our clients from DDoS threats at no extra cost.
4. Easy Scalability For Growth or Traffic Spikes
Whilst your business may have started small, over time as you grow you’ll need to account for surges in traffic and growth across your projects. To accommodate this, you need managed cloud hosting for your developers that can effortlessly upgrade resources like CPU, memory, or storage on real-time demand.
To support a future spike in traffic, ensure your cloud provider has NVMe SSD storage, high-frequency CPUs, and optimised network architectures for optimal performance.
5. Automated Backups
Bad deployments can lead to lost hours, or even days. You can help prevent this from happening again with automated backups, another key managed cloud hosting feature, essential for SaaS businesses.
Daily automatic backups can save your team hours of development time, even when an update breaks everything or you need to restore a previous version. Gain complete peace of mind with seamless automated backups at both the file level and full VM when you use BlackBox Hosting’s managed private cloud.
6. Support for Multiple Programming Languages and Frameworks
The cloud shouldn’t restrict your developers to using a single programming language. Some cloud hosting platforms limit programmers to PHP, while others don’t provide the right supporting frameworks.
Flexibility is important because your developers don’t want to be forced to switch languages just to work with a cloud host. If you have a diverse team using multiple languages such as Node.js, Python, Ruby, Java, Go, and .net across applications, your cloud host should ideally accommodate hybrid technology stacks.
Instead, choose a cloud hosting provider that has a framework-ready environment for quick launch, setup, and also supports diverse programming languages.
7. High Availability and Reliability
You can never predict hardware failures or network outages. However, you want your cloud host to be agile enough to support access to your applications and services with minimal downtime and loss of data.
For this, you need to invest in the best cloud hosting for developers that guarantees the industry standard 99.99% uptime, which translates to less than an hour in a year.
You can count on BlackBox Hosting for this exact reason: we’ve committed to a 99.999% network uptime guarantee and have experienced no downtime whatsoever in the last 10 years. We also offer redundancy and failover infrastructure with 4-hour hardware replacement Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
8. Responsive, Pro-Developer Support
Even the best developers need help from time to time, whether for a DNS issue or a server problem. Responsive support separates a good host from a bad one.
Your software business needs knowledgeable engineers who understand development, not bots. You can prevent minor issues from becoming major development bottlenecks by using a cloud platform that gives you access to 24/7 support with real experts offering server-side support and troubleshooting.
We are known for our relentless support; relentless because we make sure you receive proactive monitoring round-the-clock and resolve 99% of tickets within the hour of receiving them.
Switch to BlackBox Hosting for a Managed Private Cloud for Your Developers
Whether you have a single developer or an entire team, BlackBox Hosting can support your growing SaaS or app business’s cloud hosting needs. Here’s what sets us apart:
- Robust 3-2-1 backup strategy with RAID 60 disk systems
- DDoS migration system with IDS (Intrusion Detection System), Fortinet’s next-generation firewalls with deep inspection IPS (Intrusion Prevention System)
- Veeam backed DRaaS with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of just 1 second and an RTO equivalent to the start-up time of the virtual machines (VM)
- Comprehensive SLAs
- Scalable Capacity of 100 VMs for quick and efficient scaling
You can count on us for agile and dependable development workflows on the cloud. Contact us or call us on +44(0)203 740 7840 to learn how our private cloud services can help your business.
