HOW CLOUD COMPUTING HELPS KEEP YOUR WEBSITE FROM CRASHING UNDER A RUSH OF TRAFFIC, WHILE KEEPING COSTS LOW

AWS democratizes advanced technology, giving you access to the same high performance, high-security web infrastructure companies like Netflix, AirBnb, Lyft and FINRA use to run their websites. Just like traffic on a highway, Internet traffic and the number of visitors to your website naturally fluctuates throughout the day. Sometimes it’s rush hour, and other times it’s 2:00 am, and you’re practically all alone.

When web traffic is low, limited demands are placed on your webserver. Whereas when many users are visiting at once, your server’s resources may become overwhelmed. How many times have you heard of a blog whose post went viral, or a company whose creative sales strategy brought users stampeding to their website, only to have the website crash? Your moment in the sun should be your moment to shine, not troubleshoot your website.

With scenarios like this in the back of their minds, and thoughts like “I don’t want to run out of space!”, website owners and administrators tend to overpay for web hosting packages.

Historically, website owners have had limited ability to quickly scale up or down their server configuration to respond to match demand. Web hosting agreements typically bundle a fixed amount of services together. You agree to a maximum usage level, and must commit to that package for a given amount of time. Users thus face a choice: either overpay now for extra resources you don’t currently need, or risk not having the storage and networking capacity available when it’s needed the most.

Enter the cloud computing model: you pay as you go, only pay for what you use, and can automatically scale your compute capacity to match demand at any given hour or minute.

So what happens in 2022 when you really only need those extra resources for a limited time period, like the three days following a publicity blitz, during the weeks leading up to your annual conference, or when Thanksgiving revelers storm your e-commerce store on Black Friday? Or when a single blog post unexpectedly goes viral, or your company runs a set flow of calculations for five hours on the third Thursday of each month?

By hosting your website on a cloud computing platform like AWS, you only pay for the compute, networking, and storage you actually use. Your server configuration can automatically scale up, down, in or out to meet your traffic needs at the lowest price possible–free for the first year, then as low as $7 per month.