The cloud is the pinnacle of hosting. It is a safe and efficient way to increase productivity, relieve IT staff and save money. It can handle tasks as small as file sharing to imperatives like crucial data backups. But there is nothing more important than ensuring you enlist the right provider.
To ensure this happens, ask your potential provider these six critical questions:
1. What services do you provide?
This is the fundamental question to ask your provider. And, whilst asking about their services is imperative, it’s also important for you to voice your company’s needs. This is because the cloud hosting provider must be able to tailor a package to your ever-changing needs as a company. This should include providing the technology for you to buy, the servers you need and easily-support Internet access.
2. Where are your data centres?
Location is pivotal when it comes to cloud and Australian VPS. Ideally, your prospective provider will house data centres in various locations. This makes it easy to serve, migrate and failover workloads from different locations. The data centres’ location and security are imperative to protecting your information. Therefore, you want to know that your data is housed in a secure, well-protected location.
3. Do you have service flexibility?
Your provider must provide server flexibility that will allow you to make decisions on-the-move. Modern businesses must have the freedom to scale as needed and when needed. What’s more, if you’re just commencing with the cloud and are unsure of your needs, it’s important that you can voice this with the provider. They should be able you with a framework for how their platform would allow you to scale your business as needed!
4. Is your network highly secure?
Here, you just consider two questions:
- How does the provider protect its clients from data loss when using a system to back up files?
- How secure is the system from data breaches?
They should provide independent author verification. What’s more, they should be able to tell you how they would be notified in the event of a data breach. They should also have a tried and tested process in place for emergencies.
5. Do you have a history of downtime?
Your cloud service provider shouldn’t have had many outages in recent years. It most certainly shouldn’t have had a situation in which their users couldn’t provide web access for long periods of time. Of course, downtime is inevitable, but it’s often how the provider reacts that makes all the difference.
One of a provider’s main objectives is to completely minimise downtime. Therefore, you should be able to ask your prospective provider about their downtime history. They should be able to give you a clear cut answer. If not, you may be dealing with a team who is no stranger to outages – beware!
6. How is your customer support?
Customer support is critical to providing an exceptional service. Technical support should be offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This includes public holidays. After all, the last thing you want is a non-existent technical team in the event of a disruption at a peak period – it would be a disaster for sales! You should ask them about their response and resolution time. What’s more, you should ask whether you will have dedicated support providing specific instructions in a disruption.
This, alongside the other imperative questions, are vital for ensuring you enlist the best service provider in the hosting industry!
