JesseImagine opening up a lemonade stand. Your business, which specializes in making lemonade, would be considered an application in the hosting world.
Now you start out by building your own lemonade stand, this acts as a server where you do all your squeezing and mixing. All that effort in turning lemons into lemonade equates to a term we call computing.
So you’ve got your lemonade stand and its parked right outside your driveway or someplace near home. This is known as keeping your hardware or infrastructure “in-house” or “on-premise.”
Supply & Demand
You invite all your friends in the neighborhood to come buy your lemonade. It’s a hot, sweltering, sizzler of an afternoon and eventually 100 people are lined up awaiting your thirst-quenching lemonade. You soon realize you only have so much computing power to squeeze all those lemons in time to meet demands. As it turns out, you can only make enough for 10 people! So now 90 of your friends leave empty-handed and parched of thirst.
Workers Assemble!
Immediately, you make reprimands and ask your friends if they know anyone who could help make lemonade for you, and lo-and-behold, there’s a couple of freshly graduated neighbors that moved down the street with fancy lemonade-certified degrees. These eager fellows know everything there is to know on how to make lemonade and even own a patent to their own unique recipe. This extra elbow grease is called Software as a Service (SaaS) when you’re paying others to use their special recipe of lemonade for you. Managed Hosting is when those same employees do the actual squeezing and maintenance of your lemonade stands.
With some money saved in your piggy-bank from all those past birthdays, you hire ten lemonade employees to help make lemonade. You buy them each their own lemonade stand, where each of them can make about 10 lemonades for you per day. This new plan should now be able to handle all 100 customers that lined up the day before.
Although after yesterday’s debacle, only 50 customers show up today. Now you only have half your staff working productively and the other half doing absolutely nothing. The worst part is that you still have to pay them at the end of the day, consequently wasting your precious birthday money.
When Life Gives You Lemons…
How do you solve this problem of unpredictability and create a cost-effective solution that will grant a foreseeable return on investment?
Answer: Stop using your own lemonade stands and rent out a lemonade factory.
Enter the Cloud Hosting Solution. Cloud providers acts as off-premise infrastructure for you to rent as much computing power as you need. End your budgeting expenses on hiring more lemonade workers to produce your lemonade and simply rent out the service that offers the exact space you need, cooking utensils, all the lemonade stands you could ever want, and all the bells-and-whistles that a 3-star lemonade business should have in its name. You now only pay a fee that fits to your expected capacity needs, instead of overpaying or underpaying for more workers.
The cloud solution even has room to adopt all your previously built lemonade stands into the factory with a cost-effective option called Colocation.
Make A Lemonade Business!
Some days might be busier than others where you have 100 customers, so you need 10 workers. Most days you might just have on average 50 customers, so you only need 5 workers. With a cloud hosting solution, you only pay for the number of workers you need. Even if that changes frequently, you’ve effectively created a solution that doesn’t use half your parking space as in-house lemonade stands. You don’t have to worry about how many lemonade workers are employed at your stands. And most importantly, you can rest at ease that there will always be enough workers to go around so that your business can scale accordingly and you can keep churning out that delicious lemonade.
Instead of owning several “average” lemonade stands, just rent one totally amazing lemonade factory that handles it all.
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