At Zmags, we have just completed moving our entire server setup from traditional servers (sometimes referred to as raw iron) to a cloud hosting solution. Our main reason for this move was that we were becoming tired of continuously adding new servers to accommodate the ever-increasing load on our system. Raw iron required ordering actual machines, waiting for setup, and was in general just too cumbersome to work with. Often we would spend several weeks waiting for new servers to come online.
In addition, our need for computing power changes literally by the hour. Sometimes a lot of our clients want to create publications and sometimes (during the night) we have much less activity. With raw iron, we had to scale for maximum utilization even though it occurred fairly seldom.
Having moved to a cloud computing platform, we are now able to set up new servers in less than ten minutes when the need arises, and we can also close the servers again when we don’t need them. This gives us immense scalability and allows us to have much more computing power in place when it’s needed, which for our clients means less waiting and more action. From an environmental perspective, this also makes a lot of sense, as we are now only powering servers that are actually used, which should further lower our carbon footprint.
In addition to having more computer power when needed, we are now also able to distribute our service on more geographical locations, which results in more resilience in case of power or network outages.
With cloud hosting, you get these benefits:
- More flexibility, as additional servers can be added in less than ten minutes
- A greener hosting environment that adapts to actual capacity
- Faster PDF conversions through more computing power
- More secure hosting of digital editions from geographically distributed services
All in all, we are pretty happy that we have been able to create a faster, more scalable, more secure and a greener solution by rethinking the way we are hosted. Raw iron is surely a thing of the past.
