Since the introduction of cloud computing technology, an ever-increasing number of small businesses have seen the advantages and adopted it as their own. What was once thought to be the privilege of the big players or only the domain of the larger corporations has now been accepted by the small-to-medium business players too.

Your small business needs to adopt this technology if it hasn’t done so already. While it is quite understandable that making a move like this is a big step forward, you should realize that it is always for the best.

Still not convinced? Do you have a valid reason to stick with the traditional networking and hosting structure (due to legacy systems, or privacy issues, for example)?

Well, what if we were to tell you there was a middle-path that you could take? Instead of making the full commitment and making the leap to a fully-public cloud hosting solution you could have the best of both worlds by implementing a hybrid hosting configuration.

What is Hybrid Hosting?

By definition, a hybrid hosting model allows businesses to implement both dedicated as well as shared servers and storages on the same network. It is also a combined cloud service that makes use of both private and public clouds so separate actions can be done in the same company.

Typically, the business implementing the hybrid cloud networking infrastructure can optimize their overall computing capabilities by using the cloud services for all their non-sensitive functions while using their private cloud and network for those that they want to keep safe from prying eyes.

What are the Advantages?

A couple of the advantages of hybrid hosting include:

• Ease of scalability: “cloud” basically means you can easily expand whenever you want to… with ease. Moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud means you are as flexible as you will ever be when it comes to expansion (and contraction in leaner times) of your servers and networks.
• Cutting Costs: with the cloud – especially the public cloud – you cut down on expenses by having the servers hosted on providers’ servers which reduce your overhead costs as well as the other expenses that come with having to maintain a server room/system.

How can it be applied in a Small Business Environment?

In a hybrid hosting IT configuration, small businesses can now expand without having to worry about what they will do with the data and servers that they have when they move to the full-cloud environment.

When it comes to implementation, smaller businesses and companies are actually at an advantage as they usually don’t have to worry too much about legacy systems and architectures and this helps them in their move towards to the fully cloud-based environment.

That is the basic, typical scenario in which you can imagine hybrid hosting a critical role in a business. But, below we have some more applications of hybrid hosting in real life scenarios that can help you better realize how essential making that move could be:

• Unexpected Success: say you are running your business at its usual pace and then one day, out of the blue, you wake up to find your goods or services are in such high demand that it could make you an overnight success… only if your system holds up and manages to perform despite the immensely increased traffic and processing.

What do you do? Well, in the traditional way you would have had probably had to halt your sales and bring your site down for a few hours as you move it all on to a larger server with more resources.

If you were in the hybrid cloud setup though, you could have easily upgraded everything without having to spend a lot of money, waste a lot of energy and with next-to-none downtime. The beauty of the cloud environment – hybrid or otherwise – will always be its easy scalability.

• Testing Platform: if you are a business you will almost always be coming up with new marketing and sales ideas. You will also be continuously searching for new ways to push your sales figures up; and many experiments will follow because of the searches.

Carrying out these experiments on your production server and network is akin to inviting disaster into your business environment. But with your public cloud, isolated from your private one, you can experiment away without any risks.

• Failover Platform: as a business, you will always want your website, server(s) and networks to be up and running at 100%, 7 days a week. But, not all wishes come true, and at one time or another you will face crashes or extended downtimes.

When that occurs, you will have to find a quick solution to get everything up and running in the shortest amount of time – even if it is using a temporary platform. And that is exactly what your hybrid cloud network will be: a stable ground where you can recreate all your production scenarios and have them made available to your users while you work on fixing your issues in the back.

Once you’re done and satisfied with your results you can replicate the whole infrastructure on your own production network or simply shut the failover network and switch back to your original one.