For the past five years, the startup scene has been taking over the headlines. A new startup is underway when you have a fantastic idea that you believe can solve business problems. It can be:
SaaS (Software as a service): Clients subscribe to the service and use it right away.
Solution provider: The startup will dedicate a consultant and tech team to work on a tailored solution to help the existing business.
The clients aren't concerned about where the startup hosts the solutions, as long as it is accessible whenever they want to use it. As for the startups, it is essential to have cloud hosting that has long-term support and scalability at an affordable price.
Major Cloud Provider
A few major cloud service providers, such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure, and GCP (Google Cloud Platform), capture the most significant market share. According to the statistics from statista, Amazon has the most market share of 32%, followed by Azure capturing 20%, and Google Cloud with 6%.
Amazon is one of the pioneers that provide cloud solutions. The most significant examples would be Netflix, Airbnb, and NASA which are all hosted on AWS. eBay, Boeing, and BMW are hosted on Azure, while Twitch, LinkedIn, and SAP use GCP. Choosing one from the list won't go wrong; these cloud providers offer a wide range of services that help accelerate the business.
However, here is the catch: most services aren't straightforward to use for most end-users or personnel that are not IT-literate. Excluding the developers to build the system, you will require an additional team of DevOps to provision, manage and scale the solutions.
On the other hand, these cloud service providers suit most IT solutions that provide SaaS. With the proper knowledge, It will be able to scale up and provide more business solutions.
Now let us talk about the pricing. All three major cloud service providers are offering competitive pricing for most of the services. They come with several pricing tiers: hourly-rate, monthly-rate, or yearly-rate with the contract, which comes with a lower price.
Another point to mention is that every service incurs a different pricing tier; we will need to carefully forecast the user growth and usage capacity to stay at an expected cost. While you can set a budget alarm, expect a massive bill in the future invoice if the services are not monitored closely.
Major cloud providers will be your best choice if your business or solution is targeting the global market. You will be able to scale and clone your solutions to every region and reduce the latency, getting closer to your clients.
FullStack Application Solution Provider
Google Firebase and AWS Amplify are the most notable full-stack application solution providers. These providers offer services for users to implement a full-stack application inclusive of,
Frontend - Hosting and domain registration.
Backend - Business logic, authentication, storage, database, push notification, geolocation, etc.
These providers simplify the usage of the services compared to the major cloud providers. AWS and AWS Amplify both provide authentication services, such as Facebook and Google login, but what's the difference between them?
AWS - You will have to set up AWS Cognito from scratch, where you will need to set up user group, login flow, URL redirection, register Facebook developer and obtain the key and secret, etc.
AWS Amplify - You will only need to provide the Facebook developer key and secret and the URL redirection.
These providers are better options for a startup with a minor core technical team that focuses on delivering the business solutions and does not want to be concerned about the infrastructure. Due to these providers being built on top of those major cloud providers, they pay the cost of hosting on your behalf, so the price is nearly impossible to be lower than if you did it directly on major cloud providers.
Also, as they simplify utilizing the services, that will be included in the pricing as well. There is a concern when you are building your solution on these providers as it might limit your solution enhancement. It is because these smaller providers might not provide the services that you need. You will need to look at other solution providers, and it will be challenging to integrate a few different providers.
Minor cloud provider
The other cloud services are providers that offer similar services but are limited to specific services. Again, you might have heard of a few famous providers, such as Netlify, DigitalOcean, and Heroku. These providers simplify the process of using services, providing one-click deployment and enabling the end-user to deploy their latest changes with almost no effort.
Let's take a closer look at Netlify and Heroku. It offers one-click deployment for the frontend and enables users to host the backend; it does not offer database service; your team will need to host the database somewhere else. Heroku does offer databases and backend API hosting, but you will find it troublesome to host the frontend, as you will need to create a dyno (a VM instance); it will be challenging to do compared to Netlify.
Each of them provides different services that they are best at, but does not offer full-stack services, so make sure you are aware of the services they are providing before deciding to use them.
Key Takeaway
Suppose your startup leans heavily on business and only needs a simple system to perform everyday actions like content management. In that case, these major cloud providers might not be the best choice.
However, there are plenty of ready-to-use solutions for such scenarios, and it saves cost and time on scaffolding the system's infrastructure. Shopify, WordPress, and WooCommerce are among a few popular SaaS that requires much lesser IT knowledge to start.
Before deciding which cloud service provider to use, it is worth spending time to understand your system, what services does it need now, and what benefits it will need in the future. If you have chosen a provider that does not fit your needs and is required to migrate to a new platform, that will not be an easy task, and it consumes a lot of time to do so without improving the business value.
On the other hand, if your startup has sufficient funds and can afford a DevOps team, major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP will be your best bet. It is because it will have the most prominent growing opportunity. However, if you want to have a fast start and go into business in a much shorter time, go for smaller cloud solution providers.
Popular posts
After the seed rounds funding, many startups are ready to hire their first software development team. In a study, 23% of small businesses fail because they don't have the right team. So, how to build the right team for the early stage startup?
Everywhere across the world, the tech industry is booming, and talent is in high demand. So why are so many developers, programmers and tech workers still struggling to find fulfilling careers?
