An Entrepreneur’s Checklist for Selecting a Cloud Vendor
An entrepreneur’s life is tough. Along with chasing their dreams, they also have to look after their infrastructure requirements. Typically, an internet startup will only have a couple of hands available. The risks are high and there’s usually not much money involved. Fortunately, the cloud is making things a little easier recently — a silver lining, so to speak.
Here is a brief checklist of what entrepreneur’s should look for in a cloud vendor.
Setting up entire online infrastructure
To borrow from management jargon, an entrepreneur must devote all his energy to his primary business goal. This leaves him very little time to do anything else. Setting up online web servers can be tedious process. Moreover, you don’t want to hire a technology fiend who will eat into your budget. As an entrepreneur, you must therefore look at a cloud vendor who will do the initial grunt work for you. This includes installing the operating system, software and utilities that you need. A good selection of services to run on your server, the installation of a security pack, and the configuration of load balancers are some features which you’ll require.
Maintenance and upgrades
The sad part about servers is that they require constant and regular maintenance. Operating systems undergo upgrades every few days and keeping up with the patches is a grind. As an entrepreneur, you would like to offload this task to a reliable person. It would be highly desirable if your cloud vendor can provide this. If the maintenance crew is different from the cloud vendor, you may have to play mediator between the two — a situation which you probably don’t have time for.
Auto scaling features
Assuming all goes well with your business, you will require additional resources to accomodate higher traffic to your site. It’s a happy situation, but can turn out to be very costly if your server crashes due to overloading. Fortunately, cloud technology is specifically designed to avoid this kind of a catastrophe. You must be able to automatically scale up the number of servers with increased demand. You must also be able to scale down when required. You don’t want to spend an extra dollar more than required. Your cloud vendor must therefore provide auto scaling. Load balancing is another feature which an entrepreneur must look for. These features are better explained in GMO Cloud’s High Availability Features page.
Control Panel
A good control panel gives you information about the health of your online infrastructure. You must be able to have a clear overview of your servers, and it shouldn’t be more than two clicks away. Monitoring the health of your setup and concomitant costs can be a handy budgeting tool.
Conclusion
This checklist will certainly cost you money, but the convenience and efficiency which you can stand to gain is worth the money you invest. You must remember that your business needs to run smoothly without any interruption. Choose the right cloud vendor and spending a bit more to save your business.
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About the Guest Author:
Sankarambadi Srinivasan, ‘Srini’, is a maverick writer, technopreneur, geek and online marketing enthusiast rolled into one. He began his career as a Naval weapon specialist. Later, he sold his maiden venture and became head of an offshore Database administration company in Mumbai. He moved on as Chief Technology Officer of one of the largest online entities, where he led consolidation of 300 online servers and introduced several Web 2.0 initiatives. He holds a Master’s degree in Electronics and Telecommunication.
