If you are new to the Cloud hosting market or if you have been in the space since the invention of dedicated servers, one of the aspects of Cloud hosting you have to deal with is the provider you choose to utilize. In this sense, like any other competitive market, the Cloud space is filled with providers large and small, established and new, expensive and cheap, reliable and not so much etc. Also like any other industry, before you can choose to utilize one of the bigger or smaller providers, it behooves you to understand the benefit of hosting with either or.
In this quick article we are going to ask one question: Should you host with a giant Cloud hosting company like Rackspace, Peer 1 and Amazon or should you host with a smaller Cloud hosting provider like Solar VPS, VPS.net and ElasticHosts?
The Benefit of Hosting with a Giant Cloud Company
There is no getting around this, Rackspace, Amazon, Google (to name a few) are the big boys of the Cloud server industry. While all reached their height in different ways, all companies have taken the lead in the Cloud hosting space to debut new technologies, truly elastic/flexible solutions, rapid scaling and dynamic infrastructure for a small monthly fee. Without question, Rackspace, Amazon and Google all provide the market with a wide variety of Cloud server options, a high variety of operating systems, an excellent resource scale model and wonderfully low monthly prices.
While the major benefit of hosting with a big boy is the new powerful technologies and ability to truly scale on demand without the worry of breaking core Cloud infrastructure, the downside of hosting with a major Cloud web server company is support, business to consumer communication and the ability to easily transfer from one host to another if you so need to.
For example, even though Rackspace has built its Cloud server hosting kingdom off of the maxim of “Fanatical Support”, Rackspace support can seem aloof, out of touch and general. Due to the size of the company, Rackspace support – although operational 24/7/365, can’t boast the 80/20 rule wherein the same tech will deal with the same consumer 80% of the time. As they say when entering college, one of the downsides to attending a larger university is students might feel like a statistic as opposed to a student. The same can be said for hosting with a large Cloud provider.
While the benefits of hosting with a large Cloud provider come in the form of great tech innovations, the benefits of hosting with a smaller company come in the form of nimble innovations, person-to-person customer/sales support and rabid price wars generating lower costs to consumers.
The Benefit of Hosting with a Smaller Cloud Provider
As mentioned, the benefit of hosting with a smaller Cloud provider comes in the form of nimble innovations, person-to-person customer/sales support and rabid price wars meaning lower prices to consumers.
The most important aspect of hosting with a smaller Cloud provider is nimble and quick innovation. Due to the size of a company like Rackspace or Amazon, by their very nature pushing through quick updates and large-scale tweaks takes a long time. Call it the cog in the machine or running everything up the corporate ladder, bigger companies can’t push out innovations quickly.
This is the major benefit to hosting with a VPS.net or a Linode. While the companies are decent size, they aren’t monsters. This smaller size allows for internal engineering, programming and coding teams to push out updates, patches, software fixes and large scale innovations on a quick time table. Whereas Rackspace might take a few months to approve a new bare metal Cloud server running a virtualization-less container system called Docker, a smaller company like Tutum could push out that update in the matter of days or weeks.
As with everything, there is a trade off. When utilizing a larger company, you sacrifice customer support for massive innovation and when utilizing a smaller Cloud hosting company, you sacrifice sometimes-dependable infrastructure for nimble innovation.
In the end, the choice is yours.