Cloud hosting has been making waves in the industry, and the demand for public cloud servers has been growing more than ever before… If you know why cloud computing is revolutionary, then the growing popularity of this technology will make perfect sense to you. To begin with, this technology is far more efficient than any other option in the market; almost negligible bandwidth and power is wasted, and to top it all, this technology is extremely reliable. This technology leverages a strong network of interlinked servers, and it is also referred to as enterprise hosting or cluster hosting.
Another great thing about public clouds is that they turn out to be extremely affordable (though private clouds could be slightly expensive), and the cloud hosting networks are extremely flexible, since they can be scaled-up anytime you want.
Here are some of the best cloud hosting providers in business today –
1. Amazon: Some of the technologies included in Amazon’s Web Services are Simple Storage Service, which is used for on-demand storage and Elastic Compute Cloud (better known as the Ec2 from Amazon), which is used for computing operations.
Other preferred services include SimpleDB, CloudFront, and Simple Queue Service. Elastic Compute Cloud was launched by Amazon back in 2021 (far earlier than most of its current rivals). Today, Amazon is so famous for cloud computing that it is almost considered to be synonymous for cloud computing by some of the customers. Thousands of small and big companies all around the world make use of their services. Amongst the various firms in Amazon’s never-ending portfolio, Washington Post, Eli Lilly, and New York Times are the noteworthy ones.
2. Google: Oh yes, Google is everywhere and it’s surely the best in cloud computing too. The search engine giant’s cloud offerings include Google Apps, word processing, Postini (which is a site creation and word processing tool), calendaring, Web Security Services, and the Google App Engine – Amazon EC2’s strongest competitor.
While the company’s foray lies in crawling the websites, ranking trillions of web pages, and rendering highly relevant results for Internet users (we all know that no one does it better than Google), it has also ventured into numerous other businesses off-late and cloud computing has almost become its business of expertise too; no wonder thousands of enterprises and institutions round-the-globe, such as North Western University and Arizona State University also rely on Google’s cloud hosting services.
3. Microsoft: Now, MS had to jump into this, looking at all the big guns trying their luck with cloud computing, especially wherever Google goes, Microsoft follows, isn’t it?
Well, rather than the copy-cat Bing search engine that renders almost the same results that Google search engine does, MS Azure is one of the most trusted cloud offerings in the market. After the launch of its beta version itself, this service created quite a furore.
It uses Windows as a service platform, which comprises of OS and developer services that can be used to come up with some enhanced web-hosted applications. After its launch, Azure did face a lot of criticism for various reasons but at the moment, it is fighting hard to pin down all the competitors. Companies like S3Edge, Micro Focus and Epicor are some of the initial clients of Azure. The only limitation as you know is the sheer fact that Microsoft supports Windows hosting, but most of the companies require the best of both world’s today, and usually look for cloud hosting providers that also support Linux hosting.
4. Salesforce: The Company’s CRM tools are the main source of its popularity, which have created enough interest in the cloud community. Their packages include analytics, automation, social networking, and marketing tools. Another big offering from the company is Force.com, which is one of the best platforms for not only building some great web applications, but also hosting them in a secure manner.
Salesforce.com boasts of a whopping 55,400 clients all across the world and they come from all kinds of backgrounds including media and communications, financial services, retail, energy and health-care.
Now, having seen these big guns in the cloud hosting market, there’s nothing to get disheartened, because this vertical is far from being saturated… With recent mishaps like the lightening attack on Amazon’s data center, folks have always been looking out for alternatives, and many of them don’t really want to even consider Microsoft due to lack of flexibility of getting Windows and Linux hosting at one place.
At the same time, there are many companies who don’t want to work with Google for their very own reasons, and those who haven’t heard of Salesforce CRM, are also pretty much unaware of their expertise in cloud hosting segment too. Therefore, it’s quite possible to find a huge customer-base in the cloud hosting arena, but the million dollar question would be whether you’ve really got what it takes to compete with big guns like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and SalesForce? And, if your answer is yes, then you should definitely give it a good shot, since you’ll have very high chances of making it big in the cloud hosting arena – so are you game?