In the last decade or so, the best practices for web application deployment often included the usage of virtual private servers (VPS). The main selling points compared to shared hosting were the dedicated resources (CPU, memory), a better isolation than shared hosting and predictable costs.
As a result, millions of web applications are served through such technology.
Unfortunately, this approach has its downsides too, and we see that customers approach us with a lot of issues with these legacy solutions, especially when the application becomes more popular than predicted or doesn’t age well.
Because the scaling of a VPS server is a manual process that can include time consuming administrative processes and downtime, these servers are never at their exact desired capacity. Most of the time, the machine is either underused or overused.
Also, managing VPS servers was typically a manual task, prone to errors and without a modern approach of configuration management.
Securitywise, this type of hosting introduced some risks too. These servers typically use full operating system versions (Linux / Windows) that require an aggressive patching strategy to stay secure, a task that is more than often forgotten when the application ‘seems’ to work fine. And if you ever managed such a system before, the sting is in the tail. If the servers lifetime is too long, sooner or later you end up with an unsupported mix of libraries, updates, patches and scripts.
In the past few years, we took some of our customers with legacy VPS servers on a journey to the cloud, effectively replacing the VPS servers with cloud components.
After the migration path, the advantages are numerous. First of all, you only pay what is consumed: if your site suddenly goes viral, it won’t go black anymore: the resources are scaled within defined limits. If the traffic volume is low, so will your costs. The security posture is much better. Using cloud native tooling for load balancing, WAF, certificate offloading and hosting, multiple lines of defense are at work.
Still using a VPS? Talk to us. Now is the time to migrate to the cloud. In a few steps and with a tailored approach, we’ll guide you through the process.
And because we are so convinced we can help, we pay back the time you take to talk to us in cloud credits.