Moving to Google Cloud
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We are excited to announce that we have started using the Google Cloud platform to host part of our infrastructure. We are constantly researching possible new data center options so that we can offer the newest technologies and the highest level of speed and reliability at convenient geographical locations to our clients. During the last year, we have explored services provided by the biggest cloud providers to evaluate who could meet our needs best and the Google Cloud platform stood out. The first Google Cloud locations, which we already use, are in Iowa, USA; Eemshaven, Netherlands; London, UK; and Singapore. All of our new customers get activated in these locations and we have started to move some of the existing US and European customers too.
What are the advantages of Google Cloud?
Easier scaling and resource management
Our hosting platform has been thriving on bare metal for 15 years. We have always done an excellent job in minimizing the risk for our sites’ uptime by providing resources and equipment redundancy, keeping backups, and optimizing our restore processes. We believe that this quest is easier on the Google Cloud environment, where our infrastructure is built on top of virtual machines, instead of bare metal servers. Launching a new virtual machine is a much faster and efficient process. Scaling resources such as CPU, RAM, and storage is also much easier. This allows us to achieve the results we are looking for with much less investment in idle resources and management overhead.
Distributed storage for high data redundancy
Another advantage of the cloud setup is the distributed storage. We are using Google’s SSD persistent storage, which has multiple redundancies. What this means is that your website data is not stored on a single physical machine and is not lost if the hardware on this machine fails. In the cloud setup, in the rare occasions where the hosting server fails, we can just spin up a new virtual machine on another hosting node in our cloud space and simply attach the distributed storage volume to the new instance, instead of the faulty one, without losing time in backup restores.
State-of-the-art network for faster sites
Google is known for maintaining one of the fastest and most powerful networks, which means that using their service will result in high speed for our clients’ websites. One can also hardly think of another global network that is better maintained. We see this as a great advantage, as in general network connectivity problems are among the top reasons for server downtime. With the Google network, the risk of such issues is further minimized.
Multiple opportunities for new data center locations
Working with Google Cloud gives us the opportunity to quickly add new locations outside the regions we currently operate. We have started with the regions that the majority of our customers are hosted — the USA and continental Europe. Stay tuned to find out what our next location is going to be.
100% match with renewable energy
Another thing that we consider as a very important advantage is our mutual commitment to sustainability. Google matches 100% of the energy consumed by their global operations with renewable energy and maintains a commitment to carbon neutrality. This includes Google’s data centers and Google Cloud. Google has been a leader in energy efficiency with their achievements in reducing the compute emissions by improving higher efficiency of data serving and storage and diverting waste.
We are truly excited about the official start of our cooperation with Google and will be keeping you updated on its development, whenever a new location is added or any old location is being transferred to the new Google Cloud data centers.
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