How do I choose a Cloud hosting package?

In recent years, many Internet hosting companies have launched cloud offerings. This new approach to hosting brings with it many advantages (flexibility, scalability, etc.). But it also means that customers wishing to take the plunge have to take new constraints into account when choosing the solution best suited to their needs. Read all our advice on the challenges facing IT services.

The first part of this article sets out the main criteria to be taken into account when choosing a Cloud hosting solution. A comparison of a selection of existing offers is presented in the second part.

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Criteria

• Private Cloud or Public Cloud? A public Cloud is one in which the infrastructure is shared with other customers of the Cloud hosting provider. In contrast, a private Cloud consists of hosting the customer's services on a set of dedicated physical servers.
• Nationality of the hosting provider. The country to which the company belongs, and the geographical location of the platform. This criterion can be used to determine whether the hosting provider is subject to laws such as the American Patriot Act. For the record: the Patriot Act authorises the American security services to access computer data held by individuals and companies, without prior authorisation and without informing users. This access can take place on data stored at a US hosting company, even if it is a subsidiary located in a different country. Similarly, a subsidiary of a non-US company, but based on US soil, could potentially be required to provide access to its data.
• Technology. Type of virtualisation used. This enables you to find out whether or not the hosting provider uses Open Source technology, and to obtain information about the level of partitioning of the system from other systems on the same physical server.
• SLA (Service Level Agreement). Expressed as a percentage of time (e.g. 99.99%), this criterion corresponds to a contractual commitment by the hosting provider on service availability. A distinction must be made between the network SLA and the infrastructure SLA. The network SLA refers to cuts in access to the infrastructure when it continues to operate, whereas the infrastructure SLA refers to a total cut in service (due to a power failure, for example).
• Data redundancy. Guaranteed availability of stored data. Hosting providers generally provide information on the geographical sites to which data is replicated.
• Maximum resources per VM. Maximum characteristics available to a VM (number of processors, amount of RAM, disk space, etc.).
• Load balancing. The presence of an offer comprising hardware equipment or a software solution enabling load balancing on several servers.
• E-mail and telephone support, on-call duty. Is telephone support included in the offer? Is it available 24/7? Is a technician or engineer dedicated to each customer?
• Intervention and resolution guarantees. Presence in the contract of a GTI (guaranteed response time) and GTR (guaranteed resolution time).
• Optional services. Different types of services offered as extras: supervision, backup, facilities management, consultancy, etc.
• Pricing. Type of invoicing offered: monthly, hourly, proportional to usage, etc.

Types of hosting

The diagram below shows that a Cloud offer should not only take into account the hardware infrastructure aspect from a financial point of view, but should also consider ALL the services that are important for your Information System: supervision, security, backup, maintenance, upgrades, on-call services. These elements are part of your infrastructure environment and should not be neglected.

Specifications

This list of criteria is designed to help you draw up a specification tailored to your needs. These specifications may include the following points:

• the criticality of the application and the expected availability
• the system resources you need (computing power, number of IOs, network bandwidth, etc)
• the cost/budget allocated
• the confidentiality/sensitivity of the data hosted
• the planned short-, medium- and long-term development of the application
• the support expected from the hosting provider
• supervision of hardware BUT ALSO of software (operating systems, system applications, business applications)

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Comparison of existing offers

Here is a table showing a selection of existing offers and some of the criteria mentioned earlier in the article:

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