Hybrid clouds are one of the fastest growing types of Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings in the market. They can provide a number of special benefits to companies with a specific set of characteristics. NFL blogging site, FanSided is a good example of the type of business for whom hybrid was a perfect match.
As FanSided.com grew to a national blogging network, their sites were strained during the traffic-heavy NFL season. If this sounds familiar to you, then you’ll recognize the importance of choosing infrastructure that is responsive to and allows for easy management of traffic fluctuations.
FanSided’s prior infrastructure comprised of two web servers and a dedicated database server. This sufficed during spring and summer, but NFL-season surges would cause crashes. This was turning off FanSided visitors and hindering the network’s array of bloggers. The combination of a public-facing website or application as well as a private database is a strong indicator for a potential hybrid use case.
In summer 2012, FanSided searched for a more reliable solution to handle the changing load while remaining cost-effective. They were used to dealing with a turnaround time of three full days for additional temporary servers. A hybrid setup would drop that to a matter of minutes by placing their website in a public cloud so they could easily adjust for traffic fluctuations. In addition, they would save costs because they could turn off resources they were not using as needed to avoid expenses on unused resources.
For this particular set-up, Hostway recommended a platform which linked a managed server through a private VLAN connection to the cloud servers. Since the database played a critical role, a dedicated database server became part of the equation. This offered both the stability and security they needed for their database-intensive backend as well as the ability to increase and decrease resources in the cloud on the fly throughout the year for their website.
After FanSided’s trial, they officially signed on citing Hostway’s reliability, flexibility, ease of use and customer support as their reasons for making the move.
FanSided is just one example of the type of business that benefits from hybrid cloud. If you business experiences any of the following, talk with your IT department or Hostway about whether a hybrid cloud is right for you.
- Extreme traffic fluctuations – seasonal or otherwise
- Underutilized resources for the majority of the year
- Needless expenditure on underutilized resources
- Some, but not all, online systems need dedicated level performance
Follow this link for the rest of the FanSided story.