Why You Need a Cloud Hosting Provider in Another Region

Cloud hosting has several benefits over hosting your company's servers in your own in-house server rooms. It's more secure, more reliable, easily scalable, and the performance is much higher.

But beyond just hosting your company servers in the cloud, you should consider the region where your cloud hosting provider is located. Regional cloud hosting is the idea that you look for different cloud hosting providers in different parts of the country or the world.

There are benefits to hosting your company's data servers in a completely different part of the world, including local data privacy compliance, increased performance, and latency reduction. We'll look at some of the reasons why you need a cloud hosting provider in another region.

What is Cloud Hosting?

Before we talk about regional cloud hosting, let's define what cloud hosting is in the first place. Cloud hosting is where you deploy a single server, or several servers, as part of a larger network of physical and virtual servers, in a place other than your headquarters or satellite location.

These servers are stored in another physical location far away from you. Your servers, along with thousands of other servers, are stored in a large climate-controlled building with very limited physical access. By working with a dedicated cloud provider, you can improve your overall performance over in-house servers for a number of reasons.

Cloud hosting offers several benefits over traditional in-house hosting:

• It costs less than in-house servers. You can lease a cloud server for a lot less than it costs to buy a state-of-the-art server. In some places, you can expect to pay .11 NIS ($.03 USD ) per gigabyte when purchasing something that's multiple terabytes in size. Yes, you'll pay an ongoing monthly cost, but cloud servers will be upgraded and updated for you at no extra cost. If you own the server, you should upgrade every three to five years, and that will always cost more than monthly lease over the same amount of time.

• It doesn't require increased staff. The bigger your server needs, the bigger your IT department needs to be. That means hiring more staff, paying more salaries, and dealing with staff shortages. But a cloud provider hires the staff, which means you don't need to hire anyone to manage that portion of your business.

• It has lower energy costs. It costs a lot of money to operate a rack of servers, and you also have increased energy costs just to keep the room cool, and everything has to run 24/7. Your energy costs can be a major part of your business' operation, and your server room can be a big part of your energy costs.

• It saves time. If you need additional space and computing power, you can order it in minutes. If you need to buy new servers, you have to wait for delivery, installation, and testing before you're up and running, which can take several days.

• It's scalable. You'll eventually run out of physical space in your server room, and you'll need to either expand or move. With cloud computing, you can order as much computing and processing power as you need. Plus, you'll pay for it only as long as you need it. If you buy a server, you're stuck with that server all year long, even if it goes unused for most of the year.

• It's more secure. Good server cybersecurity solutions are AI-based, and they learn and improve based on the number of attacks it receives. Major cloud providers have some of the best cybersecurity systems on the planet. A small server in your company's server room will not, because it doesn't have the same AI-based security software.

What is a Cloud Region?

A cloud region is the physical location where your cloud servers live. There are cloud regions scattered throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America.

Companies often benefit from hosting their cloud servers in another region as a way to protect them from any number of local/area failures. Some companies will even go so far as to have their cloud servers and backups hosted in a number of different regions.

Why You Need a Cloud Hosting Provider in Another Region

The temptation for many companies looking for a cloud hosting provider is to find one as close as possible to their own home region. That's a natural feeling, as many people feel protective of their data and intellectual property.

They feel that if they can provide a safe and secure environment close to their office, then their servers are better protected and less likely to be attacked. However, that doesn't make a difference to a hacker. Everything is in the cloud to a hacker, including your own in-house servers.

In truth, your data is much, much safer if it's in a cloud environment in another region. You not only receive better cybersecurity, but you're more protected from local and regional disasters and emergencies.

It costs less based on the local economy

Maintaining servers in a different country can help reduce costs by taking advantage of lower operational expenses in those areas. We've already discussed how cloud computing can cost a lot less than purchasing your own servers to keep and maintain in-house. For one thing, you can spend as little as a few cents per GB of storage. Compare that to several thousand dollars for buying a single server that you have to upgrade and replace three to five years later.

More importantly, it can cost less to have data hosting in another country just for local economic considerations. In general, hosting costs can be lower or higher in different parts of the world just based on their local economy and their labor costs. So in some parts of the world, you can get high-quality IT support for a lot less than you might in other countries, like the United States, where top IT staff are paid more than $100,000 per year.

Not to mention, the exchange rate may work in your favor when purchasing the hosting services. A country with a favorable exchange rate may result in lower prices, which means you may want to consider paying a couple of years in advance in case the exchange rate flips suddenly and you find yourself on the losing end of the equation.

Disaster recovery and loss prevention

This part is critical. It's important that your business has backups of all your proprietary data, financial data, customer data, intellectual property.

This can be important if you ever experience a power outage or even a major catastrophe, like a natural or manmade disaster. Too many companies have failed because their data was lost in a flood, fire, or ransomware attack. If your workplace is in an area that's at increased risk of a natural disaster, you could lose all of your data if you keep your server on your premises.

But a cloud service provider lets you backup all your critical data to a place other than your own office. You're able to easily access the data remotely, since that's what you've been doing on a daily basis: everyone logs into the servers remotely, usually all sitting in your office.

But, they can just as easily access this information from a remote workplace, which has become a necessity in the last few years.

Improved performance and reduced latency

Placing servers in different geographic locations can help improve the speed and reliability of your data transfer and access. This can improve communication quality because the network patches will have to travel through fewer exchange points.

Your web visitors and your employees may be in a different part of the world. Rather than making them connect to your company servers or website from halfway around the world, you can use a cloud hosting provider in another region to speed up the network performance.

In some cases, the workload you're deploying in one region needs to connect to the work running in a different region on a different server, which means you may need to split the difference.

For example, if you have users in the United Kingdom who need access to data that's hosted in a private data center in India, you may want a cloud hosting provider in Israel because it's roughly halfway between those two points. Choosing a provider closer to India or to the UK may not deliver the best overall performance because it will take longer to move data from the other region.

Improved SEO

If you have customers in different parts of the world, you need a website that is not only written in their language, but is also housed in that country. For example, a company based in England may have trouble attracting web visitors in Italy. Even if the website has been translated into Italian, it won't show up in the Italian search engines because the website is not hosted there.

For this reason, companies are encouraged to buy domains in a particular country, rather than trying to buy them from their own country. In some cases, certain countries won't even sell a domain if the buyer is not located in that country. That means working with a trusted agent in that country to buy the domain and hosting, and to oversee the website administration.

Once it has been purchased, though, you can easily access and manage it from your home office location.

Increased Security

By spreading your data and applications across multiple server locations, you can reduce the risk of a single point of failure and increase your overall security. This is called a multi-region approach, and it can certainly save you if things go wrong.

For example, if you have your servers in-house, you can lose all of your data and information in a fire or natural disaster, so moving everything to the cloud will protect you in those events. But there are some instances where an entire region can go out because of a large-scale disaster or even a cyberattack called a distributed denial of service (DDOS) that knocks out internet access for an entire region.

That's why some companies will implement a multi-region approach, putting their primary server in one region and a secondary server in a completely different one. This way, if the primary region goes down for any reason, they can quickly and easily switch over to the other region without losing any time or information. Some may even keep their backups in a third region.

Compliance

Some industries have strict regulations that require companies to store sensitive data in specific geographic locations, having a remote server location can help you meet these requirements. You may be required to keep certain data within a specific geographic region, so you'll need a cloud hosting provider within that region.

This is called data sovereignty, and it's the idea that the country's government has the right to control the storage of its citizens' data. It also means the government is responsible for protecting that data from unauthorized use and access. This is very important in countries and regions with strict privacy laws, like Iceland, Canada, Nigeria, Japan, and the European Union.

If you do business with a large number of customers in a country with strict privacy compliance laws, you'll be required to host that data in a cloud server in that country and not your own. This is another reason to work with a cloud hosting provider in another region.

Final Thoughts

Regional cloud computing has several advantages over in-house servers and in-country cloud computing operations. Not only is it safer and more secure, but you can reduce operational costs, comply with local data privacy laws, improve search engine optimization, and greatly aid in disaster recovery and loss prevention.

The significance of regions in cloud hosting cannot be overstated. At Verpex, our robust global network, powered by 12 server locations across five continents, ensures that our clients can enjoy optimal performance without the need to worry about regions. We invite you to explore our dedicated cloud server plans and let us handle the complexities of regional infrastructure, so you can focus on driving your business forward.

To learn more about how cloud computing can help your organization, please contact us for a free demonstration from one of our cloud computing experts.

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