Survival in the Cloud: don’t put all your eggs in one basket

Spread risk by spreading your apps and clients among multiple servers.

It’s advice you’ve probably heard many times since you were a child: don’t put all your eggs in one basket! But that little piece of wisdom has a very important message that applies directly to your cloud-based business.

Let’s say you manage websites for 100 clients on a cloud provider such as ColossusCloud and you’re using cPanel to manage their hosting. You’d like to save costs and be more efficient, and so you put them all on one cPanel server. Seems like a good idea, right? Not quite.

As we’ve discussed many times on this blog, server downtime is an inevitable part of doing business online. It may be a result the operating system you’re using having reached its End of Life (EOL) and no longer being supported by its vendor, and you’re faced with migrating your clients to a new server. It may be that your server has been hacked and broken into. Or it may be that you’ve just installed new security updates and you need to reboot the system.

Whatever the cause, the result is the same. Your server goes down for a while – and all your clients and apps are in trouble. All your proverbial eggs are ready to break.

What can you do to reduce this risk? The answer, of course, is to spread your clients out among several different servers, to minimize the impact on your business if one of them goes down.

Here at ColossusCloud we give you the option to deploy your virtual servers in six fully independent regions:

• Santa Clara, California (right in the heart of Silicon Valley)

• Las Vegas, Nevada (a place with low risk from natural disasters)

• Dallas, Texas (the south’s internet core)

• Ashburn, Virginia (the east’s data center valley)

• Amsterdam, Netherlands (the second highest internet traffic region in the world)

• Singapore (the Internet hub of South East Asia)

Spreading your business among these diverse, well-placed options is sure to give you peace of mind. Instead of putting all 100 clients on one virtual server, let’s say you put 25 in each of ColossusCloud’s US regions. If one of your servers goes down and only 25 of your clients are affected, that means that three-quarters of your business stays safe, and that’s a lot less stress for you!

The take-away here: never forget your childhood lessons!