- Platform Advantages
Elasticity
Our cloud offers you both horizontal and vertical scalability. Horizontal scalability allows you to rapidly change the number of separate instances to match changes in demand. Vertical scalability allows you to rapidly change the size of instances themselves in a flexible way. Critically, the elasticity associated with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) allows you to downscale quickly as well as upscale. This means you can meet peaks in demand but also not have excess capacity that you are paying for when you don’t need it. An ideal example is mobile application hosting with its explosive potential growth.
Reliability and Availability
Moving to a public cloud such as CloudSigma’s means you benefit from the economies of scale of a large scale hosting operation. We are able to have dedicated staff with specialist knowledge to ensure that our platform runs smoothly without disruptions. Our cloud is built from the ground up to produce a reliable service that eliminates and minimises service interruptions and data losses. We achieve this by employing high levels of redundancy in the way we store our data and the key hardware components that are essential for smooth operations. By migrating to the cloud, our customers benefit from our specialised knowledge and substantial investment in a robust hardware and software platform. Likewise, all our servers are located in high security, high service, dedicated data centres that ensure their physical integrity. We are very transparent and open about our infrastructure and are proud of the extra investment we have made to ensure our customers have the highest levels of reliability and service.
Quality of Service
Agility and Adaptability
By using the cloud you will gain new levels of agility and adaptability, allowing your computing needs to track and manage the demand you are facing over time. Automation of your computing resources also allows you to react in real-time to changing demands on your recourses. You can respond to ensure your customers receive uninterrupted, speedy service. The CloudSigma product allows full API control of your account allowing automation of your computing resources. Many customers use this to implement automatic horizontal and vertical scaling to allow them to maintain desired performance levels in the face of changing demand. We complement our powerful API with a browser based GUI and resource management tool allowing you to easily manage your computing resources. - Economic Aspects
Cost Reduction
Significant cost savings can be achieved through transitioning existing infrastructure to cloud infrastructure. By not owning physical hardware users benefit from having no hardware maintenance costs or depreciation. Likewise scalability and pay per usage allow tight cost controls and avoid over purchase of capacity. This makes cloud hosting an ideal platform for CPanel reseller hosting and Plesk reseller hosting.
Pay per Use
This is the capability for users of cloud computing to make sure their usage reflects their actual consumption needs and, if need be, to adapt they capacity their purchase over time. Critically, it changes computing resources from being an upfront investment to an operational expense over time. Rather than trying to predict the capacity required and having either over-investment or under-investment in computing resources, the cloud allows for resources to be purchased as and when needed. Likewise, users of cloud infrastructure do not have to purchase their peak capacity need but can turn on and off capacity as their consumption need rises and falls. This change is particularly attractive to small to medium size enterprises (SMEs) and entrepreneurs. Mobile application developers often use cloud hosting to avoid large scale upfront investment in infrastructure ahead of having a clear idea of how popular their mobile application may become. This also leaves them with the ability to scale quickly if necessary.
Quicker Time to Market
By removing the need to purchase physical infrastructure, developing solutions and bringing new products to market more quickly. This relates not only to the lead times and management overhead associated with actually purchasing physical hardware and software but also to the decision making processes internally. By using cloud computing the up-front investment is vastly reduced and the user isn’t locked into longer term contracts that represent a significant commitment.
Higher Return on Investment (ROI)
Much higher ROI is possible by deploying cloud technologies however in order to achieve this the right cloud solution must be identified in advance and then adopted. The benefits from the cloud once deployed need to be weighed against the initial investment in terms of time and money in getting the new cloud infrastructure up and running. Generally speaking, the more flexible and the less restrictive the cloud platform, the less existing systems need to be adapted to work on that platform. Higher ROI can be achieved by using cloud computing that doesn’t need new users to significant change the way they use computing resources. The CloudSigma platform, by not bundling resources, by being independent of operating system or software and by not restricting how users deploy their computing resources aims to be that platform.
Turn CAPEX into OPEX
In short, with traditional solutions, capital expenditure (CAPEX) is needed up front in order to get started. You are effectively purchasing all your computing resources for the next two years and in doing so attempting to predict what your needs will be for that period also. Using cloud infrastructure, you purchase the capacity you need as you go along, this turns your computing resource needs into on-going operational expenditure (OPEX). This has obvious cash flow benefits and also means you don’t need to make complicated investment decisions and predictions regarding future needs.
Reduced Environment Footprint
Computing and data transfer will continue to have a negative environmental impact largely due to the large electrical consumption that they entail. Until electrical production is largely replaced with green technologies, this will remain the case. There are a number of ways that its impact can however be reduced in a very real way, IaaS is one of them. Cloud providers work constantly to keep their clouds working at a high utilisation rate, these rates are typically much higher than dedicated hardware solutions where only one user with a varying utilisation rate over time is using that hardware. Cloud computing reduces that unused capacity through many mechanisms including utilisation rate based pricing which is how in fact CloudSigma prices short-term capacity. Increased utilisation rates means more work squeezed out of the same capacity with the same electricity consumption; this reduces individual users’ environment footprint. CloudSigma has a strong environment policy and commitment which includes using high efficiency data centres and hardware. 95% of our electricity comes from green generation methods. This reduces our environment footprint significantly.
- Technological benefits
Virtualisation
 Virtualisation is the key technological advance that supports the new world of cloud computing. Virtualisation serves to mask the technological complexity of the new cloud computing platforms and provides the user with the benefits. By hiding the underlying complexity of virtualising hardware, users can benefit from increased ease of use and be relieved of the overhead of managing and maintaining physical hardware. By not being tied to a particular capacity, users of cloud computing can vary their resource consumption in a way that is much more adaptable and flexible. Finally, by using virtual instead of physical computing resources, location becomes unimportant and invisible. Resources from many different physical locations can be managed as one resource. A user needing additional capacity in New York for example can add capacity instantly whilst at the same time managing capacity in London and Tokyo on the same system. If physical hardware was used, such flexibility and speed of deployment would be impossible.
Automation
Cloud computing resources are generally controllable via an API. One of the key benefits of an API is its ability to grant the user meaningful control of their resources from anywhere. Likewise, it is possible for users to write code and scripts to automate and manage their computing resources based on their requirements. Such arrangements with physical hardware are impossible or require expensive sophisticated software management systems. CloudSigma has such a full API interface allowing management and control of resources remotely and if required in an automated fashion.
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Cloud Computing 
Flexibility