Why the Big Clouds Aren't The Best Hosting Option for Many ISVs

If you're looking to level-up your software firm by offering SaaS, good hosting is vital to delivering the level of availability your customers expect. 

The big clouds (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud) are fantastic, but they're not the best choice for typical independent software vendors.

Big Public Clouds - Big Pros and Cons

Large ISVs have the money and resources to redevelop their apps to be cloud native. For them, the hyperscale clouds are unmatched, enabling locally hosting in dozens of countries, scaling to ridiculous levels and meeting certification requirements galore.

However, such benefits come at a cost. It can be hard to strike the right balance between hosting costs and performance. That's especially true for firms requiring a lot of virtual machines or a lot of RAM.

There's often complex pricing, data transfer charges, object storage API use charges and charges for 24/7 phone support.

To get the big cloud providers' best pricing may involve committing to a 3 year contract.

Customers of the big clouds are often left to figure everything out for themselves, using just a customer portal and voluminous online documentation.  That's because many hyperscale cloud customers don't need to understand what they're buying. They have expensive consultants for that. If you don't have that support, you have to figure out everything for yourself.

You don't have to be a giant firm to use the big clouds. Some ISVs that don't have a legacy codebase are choosing to build cloud native apps from the start. However, for most UK ISVs who are not in that position, there are better alternatives when it comes to UK hosting.

Cloud Without Big Cloud's Drawbacks

Here at hSo, we've built an enterprise-grade cloud hosting service that's ideal for UK ISVs:

• To maximise uptime, our resilient cloud platform has multiple hosts in multiple data centres each with resilient power and cooling, multiple high-capacity links between each data centre, multiple Internet breakout points, a resilient SAN, 24/7 platform monitoring and automatic failover to alternative hosts and alternative data centers. Unlike the hyperscale clouds, you don't have to set up VMs in multiple 'regions' and arrange the failover. That happens automatically.
• We have a simple pricing structure. You rent a pool of resources then allocate it as you see fit. There are no data transfer fees. There are no object storage API fees. There are no fees for 24/7 support.
• You can contend your VMs, just as you would on on-premises servers. This cuts hosting costs by allowing you to size your VMs based on typical usage, instead of peak-usage, as busy VMs are able to borrow spare capacity from your pool. 
• While the big cloud providers might just give you a portal login and leave you to figure everything out by yourself using online documentation, we don't. We take the time to understand your plans and propose a custom solution that won't just work for your current requirements, but will be able to scale affordably as your hosting requirements grow over time.
• Our hosting platform is powered by 100% green energy - renewables, nuclear, plus carbon offsets to mitigate any remaining emissions. This can help you boost your firm's green credentials - an important factor if you're hoping to win business from the public sector or large stock-market-listed firms that are under pressure to show they're going green.
• Your workloads run on a platform powered by VMware Cloud Director. This ensures workload portability, allowing you to easily migrate to another provider should you ever choose to do so.
• You get direct control of your VMs via an online control panel, allowing you to reboot, pause and clone your VMs without logging a ticket.
• Your workloads would be hosted in the UK exclusively, so your data and that of your customers doesn't stray into foreign jurisdictions that would complicate legal compliance.
• You receive 24/7 UK support by phone and email from our London-based Customer Service Centre. 

If you'd like to learn more about our work for ISVs, check out this cloud hosting case study or call us on 020 7847 4510.