Jun 28, 2011

Three Reasons why our Cloud Servers Are Simply the Best

ARTICLE SUMMARY

We asked around, and we found that people want three things out of their cloud servers: a good price, reliability, and damn-good support.
Some cloud providers will charge $1,000 or more for the 50 GBs of bandwidth that we include in our $39.95 base price.
We've already been engineering a groundbreaking cloud environment for years.

[caption id="attachment_393" align="alignright" width="378" caption="cloud hosting"]

[/caption] So you're out looking for cloud server (or, to be more specific, a server instance hosted in a cloud computing environment), but you're not completely sure how to distinguish one service from another (there are a lot of so-called cloud providers out there these days, after all). So one of the things we did, to get a better idea of what customers really wanted when looking for a "cloud provider," was ask around. After all, we speak to thousands of developers, IT pros, business owners, and technologists every week. So we tapped into the pulse, so to speak, and we noticed that three points kept coming up. And, boy, were we relived, because as it turns out, we stack up pretty darn nicely on all three of these items: price, reliability, and support. Let us elaborate: PRICE If you've ever seen our Cloud product page (click here), you've probably noticed right off the bat that our entry point is pretty darn good ($39.95 per month). For one-third of the monthly price of most bare-bone dedicated servers out there, you can get yourself an easily scalable server instance that sits on a heavily redundant infrastructure. But let's forget base price for a second. Let's talk about bandwidth. We offer 50,000 GBs. That's included in the base price (not lying). See it for yourself. The reason this is a big deal is simple. Fifty thousand GBs is an absurd amount of bandwidth to give away, which is evidenced by the fact that our competitors will charge a grand or more for that much bandwidth. RELIABILITY If there's one big thing that IT folks are leery of when it comes to cloud hosting, it's reliability. It's an understandable concern, considering the recent high-profile outages in the news. Although we can't promise that there will never be any downtime whatsoever (and nobody could honestly promise that), we've actually been delivering very near 100 percent uptime since we first launched our public cloud infrastructure more than a year ago. With the systems and redundancies we have in place, we will be able to provide more than 99.99 percent uptime once that timeline stretches across a multitude of years. We've got a rock-solid infrastructure (powered by Dell Blades and Compellent SAN), no single point of failure, and the best system engineers watching everything around the clock. To learn more about our technology chops in terms of the cloud, and to read how we've been engineering a cloud infrastructure for years, click here. SUPPORT If you've hosted with us for a while, you're probably familiar with our high-quality support. We've provided 24/7/365 support since 1997, and we were one of the first hosts to do that. It's what we're known for and we can prove it. Just give us a call now or at 3 a.m., and we'll help you with everything you need. It's probably important that we point out that we have 3 full 24/7/365 teams. Not just phone support, but also a team of system engineers and network operations---all available to assist customers with any issues, no matter what size, and regardless of the day or time. As for managing your cloud instance, we've gone to great lengths to make it easier to control. Our "VPS Management" console, which we built from the ground up in our WebControlCenter, lets users literally control, minute-by-minute, resource allocations. For most actions, it's as easy as clicking a button. So, let us know what you think. If you're looking for anything in cloud hosting that we didn't mention above, let us know in the comments section below.