Outsourcing your hosting to the cloud is an effective way to reduce the burden of high infrastructure costs on your software business. Cloud hosting services are available as shared hosting, dedicated hosting, and virtual private services. Whichever type you choose, cloud hosting services support your business, offering benefits from fully-managed cloud services to scalability for growing business demands.
However, these advantages come with a number of common cloud challenges of moving to the cloud, with potential hosting problems that have the power to significantly impact various aspects of your business.
This blog explores the 5 common cloud challenges affecting software companies and how to overcome them.
1. Maintaining High Availability and Uptime
Downtime is more than just an inconvenience. Every minute of downtime can impact your bottom line. Databarracks notes that the average cost of IT downtime for UK businesses is a staggering £212,000 per incident, including the direct costs of sales and indirect costs of employee productivity.
Besides keeping your staff idle and losing revenue, IT system downtime can also impact your customer satisfaction. This unplanned, emergency downtime can be caused by anything from hardware or software failure to security breaches or administrative errors.
Your business can overcome this common challenge by:
- Partnering with a cloud hosting provider that guarantees the industry standard of 99.9% uptime rate. For reference our uptime is 99.999%
- Choosing a provider with a robust disaster recovery plan that reduces your risk of losing important data and facing major disruptions
- Implementing failover systems that switch to backup servers if the main server goes down
With BlackBox Hosting as your private hosting provider, you can enjoy a hassle-free, fully-managed private cloud hosting service with guaranteed 99.999% network uptime and a variety of commercial backup solutions. Fortify your cloud hosting strategy by partnering with us today.
2. High Hosting Costs
High upfront costs are another of the greatest cloud challenges that growing software companies face. Setting up an in-house private cloud hosting solution means buying servers, building data centres, and hiring IT experts to maintain systems. All these costs add up quickly, especially for software start-ups and growing IT firms.
Many companies lean towards public cloud hosting for cost benefits, but they come with their own share of cloud risks and challenges, such as lower security and limited customer support.
You can manage high hosting expenses by:
- Working with a private cloud hosting firm that offers static, transparent billing and scalability.
- Analysing hosting plans of multiple providers based not only on costs, but on speed and performance to ensure you’re finding the right solution for you.
3. Poor Performance and Speed
Your software business will pay a heavy price for a slow-loading website or app. Visitors have little patience for long loading times and may stop using your product. According to Google, 53% of mobile website visitors will abandon a site if page load time exceeds 3 seconds, and may never return.
The best ways to avoid and overcome this issue are by:
- Using CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) for quicker delivery of static content like images and scripts
- Optimising your code and database queries for faster performance
- Enabling caching on your content management system of choice, if available
- Picking a cloud hosting provider with high end infrastructure to support and scale faster performance speeds
4. Security and Compliance Pressure
Your software business deals with complex, invaluable, and sensitive client data and files, making data security a non-negotiable asset. Compared to public clouds, private cloud hosts offer better security, and come with the added responsibility of fulfilling industry regulations.
Overlooking these compliance requirements when selecting your hosting partner could put your company at risk of data breaches and penalties.
The best way to bypass this hosting problem is by:
- Ensuring your private cloud hosting provider meets GDPR or HIPAA regulations
- Confirming that your hosting provider has strong security measures in place, including data encryption, user access controls, and regular security audits
- Keeping your software systems up-to-date with the latest patches
- Protecting your data with next generation firewalls, encryption, and strong passwords
Choosing BlackBox Hosting as your private hosting provider guarantees you access to a secure hosting environment for your software business. Our ultra-secure next-gen layered security includes Fortinet Next Gen firewalls, full DDOS and ransomware protection, and internal security and annual penetration testing. Our clients count on us to protect their businesses from every threat.
5. Inadequate Support and Expertise
Software companies need continued support for their DevOps and workflows, where speed and efficiency are paramount. Without the right hosting support and technical expertise, your team’s progress can slow down.
You can overcome this hosting problem by:
- Selecting a hoster that supports automation tools and infrastructure
- Ensuring the hosting environment matches your production setup to avoid deployment issues
- Offering round-the-clock proactive monitoring and prompt ticket resolutions
Experience relentless support in action with our dedicated TechOps team.
Overcome Common Cloud Risks and Challenges with Blackbox Hosting
Of the many ways to host your website and database servers, you probably have your selection narrowed down to two choices: public or private cloud. While public cloud hosts seem affordable and highly available, they work on shared infrastructures, often giving you less transparency around billing and, more importantly, insufficient support when things go wrong.
In contrast, private clouds dedicate their infrastructure and resources to overcoming common risks of your business, but all this can come at a cost.
BlackBox Hosting takes the stress out of hosting your business and helps you avoid the above challenges by offering:
- 99.999% network uptime guarantee; we’ve never had an outage in the last 10 years of service
- Up to 76% faster and 50% cheaper than public cloud
- Static and transparent billing
- GDPR compliance backed with the highest security, safety and continuity certifications
- 3 x Tier 3+ facility
- Customer-centric support to proactively monitor everything 24/7 and resolve 99% of tickets within the hour
Call us on +44(0)203 740 7840 or contact us for tailored private cloud hosting solutions for your IT infrastructure.
