Valentine’s day was a few days ago, and since I’m still in the mood, I am going to declare my love for the cloud. I love that at Balcom Agency, we host all of our websites in the cloud. What advantage does this have, both for us as developers and for our clients?

1. Backups – Nothing eases the mind of a web developer more than knowing there are recent backups available in case of a disaster. Our hosting providers make scheduling automatic backups dead simple.
2. Launching a website – I love launching a website into the cloud. Instead of ordering a dedicated server from a hosting company that takes a couple days to be built, I can, with a few clicks, create a new virtual server with just the specs I need to run the website.
3. Server replication – When we need to make a change to a website, sometimes we don’t want to mess with the version that’s currently running live. I can create an exact duplicate server in a matter of minutes, and deploy the updates to that server. The client can see and approve the changes without running the risk of having unwanted side effects on the live website. This takes a lot of stress off us as developers, because, believe it or not, we can make mistakes too. We can do as many test runs as we need until we feel comfortable and confident that we’ll make the changes swiftly and professionally.

The cloud is not the solution for every problem (as Microsoft has suggested), but we sure get a lot more done around here because of it.