You might think it Christmas crackers to believe a beardy, old sleigh driver donning a red hat, has anything remotely in common with an internet-based hosting solution but you’d be wrong. Both of them, in their own unique ways, can bring us many benefits. So, as Christmas approaches and we begin to let our minds wander away from work and towards the festivities, here’s a more seasonal and humorous post for you to enjoy. Here are the reasons why cloud hosting is like Santa Claus.
When it comes to running critical operations, Santa relies on his sleigh just as much as businesses need their applications. Downtime for either can be disastrous. Sleigh failure can result in millions of unhappy children waking up to empty stockings – an unimaginable reputational disaster for the worl’s most trusted brand. For others, the standstill caused by server failure not only damages reputations but can also result in significant losses.
Neither Santa nor businesses like downtime
While Santa relies on magic reindeer dust to keep his sleigh in action, for businesses, the best option is to migrate to cloud hosting where the possibility of downtime due to server failure is non-existent. The virtual nature of a cloud environment means that it delivers consistent performance with guaranteed 100% uptime. This is because its hyper-converged design protects against everything from hard disk failure to an entire server failure, enabling critical apps to be always available.
Reindeer fast performance
Speed is essential for both Santa and modern businesses. For Santa, dropping off presents to the world’s 2 billion children in a single night means he has to work fast. It’s been scientifically calculated that he needs to travel at approximately 650 miles per second to get everything done in time and to achieve this, he needs more than your average reindeer. Indeed, the average reindeer can only manage 15mph and most of those would be flagging after half an hour of pulling all that weight.
What makes everything possible for Santa is that he uses the cloud. Rather than taking the sleigh over rugged terra firma, riding high in the cloud provides an almost friction less environment to travel and where gravity has less of an impact. This massively improves his speed.
That same cloud, or one very similar to it, can also help boost the speed of your data. Indeed, as data is weightless, it can travel even faster through the cloud than reindeer, almost at the speed of light. And with high-performance servers featuring powerful Intel Xeon CPUs and super-fast SSD drives you can perform critical tasks quicker than an elf can say Merry Christmas.
Santa has been so impressed with cloud technology, he’s now adopted load balancing to prevent his sleigh tipping over on tight corners. For cloud hosting users, load balancing maximises speed and capacity utilisation so that when servers are busy, the load is distributed. This ensures that no server suffers from performance problems and, with multiple data centres at their disposal, cloud providers can always ensure optimised performance.
Both Santa and cloud hosting save you money
Whether you are buying presents for your children or cloud hosting for your business, it is important that what you buy offers you value for money. What’s great about the cloud is that you can save on the costs of running a data centre and the capital expenditure needed to pay for hardware. Everything you need is provided by the host. There will be no need to pay for premises, electricity, physical security, maintenance or insurance.
Similarly, with Santa, those who have well-behaved children can save on the cost of buying presents. Instead of spending a fortune on Amazon, simply get your nice list kids to write a letter to Santa and put it in the nearest post box. Doing this automates the process of putting presents in stockings and under the tree on Christmas Eve. Although a small delivery fee of a mince pie and a shot of something warming is required, the savings are dramatic, especially when your child has an eye for expensive electronic gadgetry.
Unfortunately. If you have naughty kids, you’ll have to supply your own presents or make do with the small bag of coal that bad list children get left.
Both come with expert little helpers
When you have significant workloads, it pays to have experts on hand to help you get things done. Santa, for example, has an army of elves who spend their days creating the presents, wrapping them up and loading them onto the sleigh. They’ll also manage the naughty and nice list and organise the presents in a way that enables delivery to be done with awe-inspiring efficiency.
If Santa has a technical problem, Mrs Clause offers 24/7 support, together with tea and biscuits, to help him find an effective solution. Last year, for example, Rudolph’s nose was a bit dim and Mrs Clause provided the right type of carrot to add to Rudolph’s food til the luminous glow was restored.
Users of cloud hosting also benefit from expert little helpers. Working away behind the scenes is an army of engineers and technicians who ensure that your hosting is expertly managed. They’ll monitor and maintain the servers, update the software, scan for intruders and malware,and generally make sure your hosting is working as effectively as possible.
At the same time, should you have any issues, a good cloud host will provide their own 24/7technical support. While they may not know one end of a reindeer from the other, they will have expert skills in helping you with all your hosting needs and will be available by phone, live chat or ticket.
Wrapping up
So, as you can see, it is possible to compare Santa with cloud hosting. Comparing, however, doesn’t mean you have to choose between them. If you’re clever and have been good all year, you can have both. Now, that is good tidings.
If you are looking for cloud hosting for your business, check out our cloud solutions.
