5 Things to Know About Hybrid Cloud Computing (Feb. 2024)

Hybrid cloud hosting is meant for website and business owners who need increased data speed and security without breaking the bank.

It’s not for everyone, but the mix of public and private cloud environments certainly has its benefits for those with specific security, storage, and/or computing needs. Here we cover five need-to-know details about hybrid cloud computing environments.

Definition | Best Providers | Cloud Alternatives | Benefits | Drawbacks | Uses

1. What is a Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid hosting is the combination of private and public cloud services, which communicate via encrypted technology that allows for data and/or app portability.

The public and private cloud components of a hybrid arrangement are independent elements — so you can protect and store data in your private cloud while capitalizing on the compute resources of the public cloud.

2. Best Providers: Liquid Web & Joyent

A common misconception is that a hybrid hosting environment can be configured by connecting any server to a public cloud provider. The reality is that the public and private cloud components have to be able to run through a cloud service — the magic technology that allows the public and private sectors to communicate.

Piecing together the necessary services can be costly and/or complicated. To ensure your infrastructure needs are met with efficient performance for an economical price, choose providers that are trusted in the industry. Below we cover our top recommendations: Joyent and Liquid Web.

Why Liquid Web?

Liquid Web will custom-create a hybrid hosting plan for you. Manage dedicated services, cloud-based applications, storage networks, load balancers, and infrastructure opps all in one place — firing off instances from an intuitive management portal.

Their Storm® servers offer a competitive advantage in scaling your applications, and the Heroic Support® team is extremely helpful, fast-working, and friendly.

Use Joyent or Liquid Web alone or together to create the ultimate hybrid — bred for security and scalability, with simplicity in mind.

Why Joyent?

Joyent is one of the foremost names in the public cloud sector, with AWS and Google Cloud as neighbors. This team practically pioneered hybrid cloud creation, particularly standing out against the competition with the crucial part three of the hybrid architecture: public cloud resources and a cloud management platform for your hybrid deployments, Triton.

Triton DataCenter, formerly SmartDataCenter, is a one-of-a-kind Containers-as-a-Service model that makes managing, securing, and scaling your hybrid simple. It’s compatible with all popular container schedulers, offering maximum application portability.

Other CaaS solutions layer container orchestration on top of virtual machine clusters. This results in unnecessarily complex VM cluster management and costly services pulled from miscellaneous providers. Triton streamlines the management and deployment process, merging container and cloud orchestrations into one end-to-end solution.

Triton eliminates the need for host-based VM management, giving you the flexibility to manage your machines and containers in one place. Furthermore, only Triton allows your containers to run on bare metal for pique performance.

Joyent recognizes the increased demand for scalable applications in cloud hosting. Therefore, Triton technology is also available as an open-source CaaS solution to be deployed in your datacenter or colo facility.

3. Cloud Hosting Alternatives

If hybrid cloud hosting sounds like more than you can chew, never fear. Much of the same popularity and energy swirls around consumer-grade cloud hosting, which offer lower costs, faster setup, and easier operations.

These three hosts below excel at making advanced hosting systems available in extremely user-friendly packages. Learn about the scalability, reliability, and affordability available by reading our reviews:

3. Benefits of Hybrid Clouds

A clear pro in the hybrid’s favor is being able to keep your private data private in an on-prem, easily accessible private infrastructure, i.e., not having to push all your information through the public Internet, while still being able to utilize the economical resources of the public cloud.

Hybrid hosting allows you to leverage the flexibility of the cloud, taking advantage of compute resources only when you need them, without offloading ALL data to a third-party datacenter. You get to maintain an infrastructure to support your average work load on-premise, but when that workload exceeds the computational capabilities of your private cloud, you still maintain the failover safety net of the public cloud.

Using a hybrid cloud can be especially beneficial in the office, as it can keep mission-critical machines connected. Unlike the public cloud alone, hybrid clouds can connect company systems like CRMs, scheduling tools, and messaging portals with on-prem hardware like fax machines, security cameras, and even carbon monoxide detectors.

4. Drawbacks of Hybrid Clouds

Although hybrid clouds are among the most stable and scalable hosting environments, they can still pose a few challenges. Among the disadvantages of hybrid clouds are the prohibitive initial setup costs associated with acquiring and setting up the complex hardware and administrative software programs.

Getting disparate cloud systems working together can be difficult, as well. Make sure to pick public and private clouds that are compatible to avoid latency or reliability issues. Be prepared to spend ample time maintaining such a massive and expensive infrastructure. Hybrid hosting is also not great in cases where data transport on both ends is sensitive to latency, where offloading to the cloud is not practical.

5. Who Uses Hybrid Cloud Solutions?

Businesses with emphasis on security, as well as those with heavy or otherwise unique physical demands, are sometimes contenders for the use of a hybrid hosting environment.

1. Finance Sector: for decreased storage and latency (e.g., investment firms pushing trades through public and private cloud for reduced latency and physical storage needed)
2. Healthcare Industry: to overcome the regulatory hurdle of HIPAA compliance
3. Law Firms: for protection against data loss and security breaches
4. Retail Market: for handling compute-heavy analytics data tasks
5. Anyone interested in securing private data

What these fields have in common is that they often deal in sensitive client information, and in the case of the retail niche, there’s something to be said for building their hybrid infrastructure in a way so as not to share information with AWS (a leading competitor).

Go Breed Your Hybrid

Well, there you have it, folks. Just like Toyota’s Prius made waves in the auto market with its fuel efficiency, the hybrid cloud trend is making headway in web hosting due to the beneficial blend of data security and compute resources.

If you’re in an industry where hybrid hosting makes sense — if you have unique security, storage, or computing needs — leveraging a hybrid ecosystem may be the perfect fit. I wish you well as you begin building your hybrid, and, as always, give us a shout if you have any questions.