Why THE Hosting Is Migrating to the Google Cloud Platform
THE Hosting, an Internet hosting service provider and cloud services company, announced that it has begun the process of migrating to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The company will transition its infrastructure from AWS in three phases over the next two years. The move comes on the heels of recent price increases by Amazon Web Services (AWS), THE Hosting’s current cloud platform provider, and Google’s introduction of new data center regions in Belgium and Finland . . . read more here . . .
What is the Google Cloud Platform?
The Google Cloud Platform is a suite of tools and services designed to help you build, test, deploy and manage applications on the Google cloud. It’s a combination of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). The platform can be used for any type of application development, including web-based applications, Android and iOS mobile apps, games, or Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The suite includes many features that are essential for developing robust applications in today’s digital world. For example, it provides access to data storage with Google Cloud Storage; integrated analytics with BigQuery; compute power with Compute Engine; and machine learning capabilities through TensorFlow. These features combined make it easy to develop high-quality applications quickly and cost-effectively. The platform also offers a variety of products that can be used together or separately depending on your needs. These include: App Engine – an easy way to create, run and scale web applications without having to worry about all the underlying server configuration details;
Cloud Functions – an event-driven serverless computing environment; Dataflow – stream processing framework for batch/stream data which allows businesses to work with data at scale using pipelines composed of batch processing jobs, streaming transformations, and user-defined functions; Kubernetes Engine – container management solution which allows users to build containerized distributed systems across different platforms such as Linux containers on Docker or Windows Server Containers running Docker images.
How does it compare with Amazon Web Services?
We’ll be able to use GCP services such as App Engine, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and others to build our product. For instance, we can deploy applications on GCP’s App Engine. We can also store data in Google’s Cloud Storage or run SQL queries on their Big Query service. In short, we get a lot of options for hosting our application with this migration. We’ll also be able to take advantage of GCP’s global infrastructure which is built for reliability and speed. That means you won’t experience any outages or slowness when accessing our website from different parts of the world! Both Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud Platform offer similar features; however, they differ in pricing models. The difference boils down to how much you need: if you only have one server running your website then Amazon Web Services will likely be cheaper since it provides single servers that are priced hourly; whereas if you’re deploying multiple servers running your site then GCP will be cheaper because they provide monthly rates based on the number of cores allocated to each machine.
Regardless of which one costs less, we’re going with the platform that provides more flexibility (i.e., GCP). After all, using a more flexible system allows us greater freedom in optimizing our environment according to specific needs–something that AWS does not offer as well. It doesn’t matter whether we want to scale up, scale down, move resources around or add new ones: GCP lets us do all these things on demand. And if something goes wrong? They’ve got our back with 24/7 monitoring and rapid response times. Overall, migrating to GCP was a no-brainer decision that has resulted in many benefits for our team so far. Not only have we been able to take advantage of their reliable hosting, but GCP also offers an API called Firebase which enables us to connect our app with the backend database and file storage. You see, before the migration, we were relying on a third-party API provider to connect our app with databases and file storage. Since this API provider recently experienced an outage that disrupted access to our web page for some users, we decided it was time for us to migrate away from them too! With Firebase at our side, downtime like this will never happen again.
What Will Happen When We Move to GCP?
The move to the GCP will provide us with more scalability and a much better experience for our customers. We are looking forward to being able to offer you all of these benefits, but we also want you all to know what this transition entails so that you can make an informed decision.
The most significant change is that your data will be stored on servers located in an entirely different country. This means that the laws surrounding how your data is handled might differ from those of your home country. Although these changes might seem scary, you all need to understand exactly what they mean before making a final decision about whether or not you would like for The Hosting Company to move your data onto the new platform. With the move to the GCP, users outside of the U.S., Australia, and Japan who have sensitive information may be at risk of having their data inspected by U.S. government agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). If users are concerned about any issues related to privacy while using our services, they should consider these factors when deciding if they would like us to migrate their information over to the new platform. There are many additional benefits associated with the switch to the GCP, though, including increased security and less downtime. The bottom line is that both sides of this argument have merits, so it’s up to each customer to decide which choice best fits their needs. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, though, one thing is certain: migrating data takes time! Be sure to sign up for notifications regarding our migration progress so that you can be prepared for when we’re ready to take care of business!
Moving Forward with GCP
THE Hosting has been a reliable partner for businesses for over 12 years. As hosting needs change and we grow, it was time to reevaluate our platform and make a change.
We started by evaluating what hosting providers we need: security, scalability, speed, and pricing. We looked at various platforms including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and others. These other platforms are great but they don’t meet all of our requirements or they are not flexible enough. We also evaluated Google Apps and realized it is an excellent addition to the cloud computing environment that we have in place with GCP. We feel confident that this decision will allow us to continue providing a superior service without any downtime or security breaches. We’re excited to be at the forefront of new technology.
We’re committed to keeping our customers happy as always so if you have any questions please email us anytime! We would like to thank you for your patience as we navigate through these changes and welcome your feedback along the way.
We’ll see you again soon! In the meantime, check out our blog post Moving Forward with GCP to find out more about how we got here and what’s next.