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“If you are in manufacturing, it’s the factory. If you are running a shop, the hosting is your store. And you must treat it that way.”
This was an analogy used by Rickard Vikström, Founder at Internet Vikings, to frame the importance of hosting services to an online business as part of a recent webinar.
He said: “I’ve seen so many cases with big ecommerce companies who don’t understand it, or think that there are other more pressing issues, but hosting would be the single easiest one to fix and increase revenue. If you have good hosting and you have low latency, you will have a better reputation online and with that lower bounce rates, less issues and higher income.”
According to Vikström, the reason why so many people don’t look into it might be because it’s so complex, not for a technician perhaps but for a manager trying to understand where best to look. This complexity shines through in many different forms, from the wide choice of hosting options through to monitoring, network redundancy and security.
As a frontrunner in the field of cloud hosting for the iGaming industry, Internet Vikings sought to dilute some of this complexity by explaining how the same hardware may translate to various options for operators of different sizes.
As part of the webinar, the Internet Vikings founder presented five different types of hosting solutions, starting with the shared hosting for SMBs or non-profit organisations, before building up to the cloud and dedicated infrastructure options.
Dedicated servers, meanwhile, should cater best for operators with concerns over security and propensity for high-traffic periods.
The difference between using dedicated servers from a third party and running off your own hardware is that your hosting company handles a problem with the server, whereas with your own hardware you deal with it yourself.
The best compromise could, therefore, be a solution growing in popularity among clients of Internet Vikings – the hybrid cloud.
“One thing that is interesting and has been growing is the hybrid cloud,” explained Vikström. “This is where you have your own hardware but want to scale up your hosting for a few hours or days based around an expected surge in activity – for example, Black Friday for ecommerce, a big event for sportsbooks or if you’re just sending out a key email campaign.”
The hybrid enables you to offload some capacity from your own hardware into the public cloud of for example Internet Vikings. So you are marrying the price efficiency of your own dedicated hardware with the ability to scale-out on demand to shared hardware.
Even though choosing the appropriate option is highly important, it is not the only thing that needs to be considered when choosing a cloud hosting provider. Together with paying attention to technical issues, customers should think about the nature of the relationship they will be able to build with a provider.
Just because a developer wants to get AWS or Azure on their resume doesn’t mean you should choose it. “There is an issue in working with giants of the hosting industry. It works well when everything is good, but if there is a problem you don’t want to work with a player that is so much bigger than your company,” said Vikström.
The real difference between hosting providers often lies in the sphere of customer service and support. So establishing strong relationships with your provider when you have several points of contact who can act quickly when issues arise is not less important than choosing the right type of hosting.
Vikström concluded: “A good provider strives to go an extra mile for its customers. We want to deliver to customers something that exceeds their expectations. Moreover, we want to build relationships with our customers, so they can rest assured that everything will be taken care of. I think that’s one of the most important things.”
For more information on Internet Vikings solutions, and tips on how to pay less for hosting services, click here to watch the webinar in full.
Internet Vikings will conduct a new webinar on 28 April titled ‘The new era or transferring data. Live with Max Schrems‘, which is dedicated to the issues of data transfers and privacy protection.
The keynote speaker of the event is Schrems, whose name is associated with the Privacy Shield invalidation. This ruling has huge implications for the industry.
You can register to this free webinar via the link HERE.
