Over time, cloud hosting technologies have improved by leaps and bounds. Cloud computing can today successfully offer many significant advantages over traditional web hosting. For start-ups or small businesses, cloud services are particularly turning out to be appealing because these do not have the money to afford or run servers on their own.
Why Should Start-Ups Use AWS?
• To begin with, there will not be any initial investments and businesses do not have to overshoot their budgets to buy costly hardware. If start-ups use AWS cloud managed services, they are easily bypassing these costs and enjoying excellent hosting solutions at the same time. Moreover they only have to pay for what they use, which is the best solution for any start-up.
• With AWS, start-ups can also think of competing with the larger companies. Big companies have the money to create huge data centers and deploy the finest development tools available. Start-ups face stiff competition in this regard, but with the AWS, they can have access to advanced hardware and development tools.
• For companies which have changing needs they do not need to invest in servers which have huge capacity that will probably remain unused. They can simply choose flexible AWS plans and pay for what they use. Moreover, the scalability that AWS will offer a start-up is most advantageous for companies which have a steadily growing user base.
• Finally, AWS is highly secure and you will not need to be worried about your data. Usually, start-ups lack the technical experts needed to keep their business data secure. But with AWS, this problem is resolved.
So, setting up AWS for small businesses and start-ups makes complete sense. They offer excellent alternatives to traditional infrastructures. Cloud hosting is not rocket science and you will need some basic expertise to get started. There are some concepts which will be uniformly present in all cloud platforms. But, the expertise you need for using AWS cannot be transferred to Google’s Computer Engine or to Microsoft’s Azure.
Some of the main components that AWS use for hosting are the EC2 virtual servers which are the main foundation of the cloud deployment. Each of these virtual servers can have varying CPU, storage, network performance, memory etc. The S3 of Simple Storage Service is capable of storing nearly 5TB data and can be accessed from anywhere online. The EBS or Elastic Block Store gives traditional file functions and is costlier. RDS or Relationship Database Service refers to a web service that facilitates simple deployments of RDBMS. Route 53 is for DNS and domain registrations and gives cost-effective rates compared to other registrars. Finally, with AWS, you can even get a year’s worth of services free of cost.
Setting Up AWS For Start-Ups:
• Launching a computer instance is easy with the AMI or Amazon Machine Images which can be loaded into a new instance. You can also use an AWS Marketplace for other images and the AWS community creates shared public AMIs too.
• Before you deploy the cloud for your business, you must select a “region” to place the virtual infrastructure. This location should ideally be nearest to most of your users or close to your developers. Having developers close by means you can improve loading speeds.
• You will also need a quality Content Delivery Network (CDN) according to how your website has been designed. For instance, businesses can use the AWS Cloud Front CDN.
• Costs of using AWS do not remain the same throughout all regions.
• Although many services offered by the AWS may be reliable, you need to prepare the business to handle outages. For example, in recent times, bugs had been detected in the Xen hypervisor which is why many AWS machines were rebooted. Ideally, the important websites must run from multiple AZ or availability zones inside a region. However, choosing a multi-zone option means more costs.
• When you use AWS for start-ups, you should also look at the security aspects. AWS gives security a lot of importance and this evident as you can install and delete productions servers easily these days. For instance, a prospective start-up had been completely demolished when hackers broke into the Amazon Ec2 control panel. When you want to make the site more secure, AWS suggests that you create limited user permissions for resource management. You must not give root user access which is unlimited. Besides, AWS will also provide MFA or multi-factor authentication features for both hardware and virtual servers.
• It is the aim of start-ups to keep their infrastructural costs low. Sometime, the increase in operational expense may even surpass costs of on-site deployments. So, AWS has a monthly calculator which businesses can use to calculate the deployment costs based on services they are using according to their estimated space and network needs. So, start-ups will be able to decide whether they can eliminate some services in the process to keep costs low. Businesses which are aware of their cost usage and want to keep costs low can use unused capacity for low rates or “reserve” i.e. pre-pay for these in advance.
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