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Digital enablement of businesses in Malaysia has led to a paradigm shift in their development.
Post pandemic, there are many businesses in Malaysia considering e-business set-up in various scales.
While some businesses are focusing on having a proper website and using the subscribed licenses for managing the office tools and solutions, there are many businesses opening the e-business set-up like developing online stores, e-transaction systems wherein the customers transact their data, financial transactions over online systems.
With increasing demand for digital enablement, the scope of hosting the applications over severs comes into account.
Among the fundamental questions related to hosting the applications or websites is about choosing the home server or the cloud server.
There is significant difference between both home server and the cloud sever models.
Both home servers and the cloud servers have its own merits and demerits in terms of hosting services.
Home Servers are like the customized and configured physical server set-up in an office premises, and the business websites or the web applications be hosted on such servers.
On the other hand, the cloud servers are about a remotely hosted server managed by third party service providers, and the businesses use the shared spaces in the remote server to host the respective business applications.
Cloud hosting using different models of cloud servers is gaining momentum as there are scores of benefits and advantages.
Large-scale businesses having very confidential information and necessity for large scale transactions managed secured are considering the home server models.
Let us explore the differences of how home server is different to the cloud server and the merits if any to consider cloud hosting as a potential solution for small businesses in Malaysia.
ICT Systems Infrastructure
Information and Communication Systems infrastructure essential for hosting the web applications is huge and in the case of the home servers, deploying such robust ICT infrastructure is a huge capital expenditure.
Setting up the home server alone do not address the requirement. There are additional factors like licensed operating systems, network bandwidth requirement for data processing, security solutions like antivirus, firewall security installations etc.
Also, there is need for manpower resources to regularly monitor the home servers and ensure maintenance as part of the business continuity process.
In the cloud server models, the physical servers are part of a large data center or a small service provider offering the cloud-based server infrastructure used for cloud hosting.
Unlike home servers where an application is hosted in one server, the cloud hosting is about deploying the applications across various geographical location servers.
Multiple clients are provided the requisite space in server for cloud hosting, and the service costs are distributed among the clients sharing the servers.
Thus, the cost of deployment in cloud servers are limited to the operational costs which increases their affordability.
Conversely, a home server scenario has both the capital expenditure and the operational costs incurred.
Resources Management
Optimal utilization of the resources and lean management approaches always has significant importance.
In the home server scenario, the scope for using the server to its optimal capacity is impractical unless there are too many complex business applications hosted.
In simple terms, majority of the case scenarios encounter under utilization of the server capacity, despite the operational costs for managing the home servers be certain to great extent.
Such conventional deployments will have under used capacities, and high costs of operations, with limited capabilities.
For instance, when users from far way locations must access the web systems of a business, there is imminent delay in processing the request loading and inherent lag in the process.
Typically, a cloud service provider would have multiple servers deployed in various geographical locations.
All the client’s applications are deployed across servers to ensure redundancy and maximum uptime.
Upon a user trying a request to the web system of a client, the cloud server which is deployed nearby to the request location shall cater the service. This leads to quicker loading of the service pages, and ease of transactions.
Also, a cloud service provider hosts multiple applications of different customers and provided managed cloud services.
This relieves businesses from the hassle of looking after technical support and other operational tasks.
Technically, the businesses use the limited space required to launch their application systems, and only pay for the server space and services used.
Eventually in the shared resources scenario, the cost of managing the cloud hosting for respective applications is low.
Scalability and Flexibility
In home server deployments, the scope for scalability and flexibility is possible, but requires more capital expenditure in managing the requirement.
As the systems capability is fixed and if there is need for more server space, the server capability needs to be extended.
In case of temporary scaling the requirement, additional infrastructure costs can be overload on businesses.
In the cloud hosting solutions, the cloud service providers manage wide range of server segments, and in general they offer flexibility in scaling the resource requirements on a real-time basis too.
The services can be elastic in terms of deploying the applications in more servers to handle the traffic or increase the temporary storage space or the storage drive requirements flexible.
The key advantage of the cloud hosting approach is to pay only for the additional space consumed and not for the whole infrastructure.
Reliability
The other key advantage of cloud hosting from reputed cloud service providers is about increased scope of reliability.
As a part of the service level agreements, the reliability in terms of maximum uptime assurance is offered by the cloud service providers.
With home servers, any kind of interruption to server management can hamper the services offered to the customers.
In cloud systems, even if one server fails, the traffic is routed to the alternate servers, and it can help in effective management.
In the cloud hosting, there are distinct kind of cloud service options like private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud models.
SMBs in Malaysia can be assisted by the cloud service provider Exabytes, in choosing the right and appropriate fit cloud hosting models.
Contact Exabytes Malaysia now for a detailed discussion and some attractive promotional offers!
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