As 2020 plans come together, we are happy to announce that the Google Cloud Platform now powers a big part of our server infrastructure. Working with one of the most well-established cloud service providers allows us to increase the speed and reliability of our customer websites even further. Along with this, we are now able to implement new technologies, standards and security principles.
How Is Your Website Affected?
The majority of our websites are already hosted on the Google Cloud Platform. Over the past two months, all new clients’ have been set up on Google’s servers. We have also successfully migrated 70% of our existing clients to this new platform. The performance and stability of the new setup have been excellent so far. Our team is currently migrating the remainder of our clients to the new platform to complete within the next couple of months.
What Are The Advantages Of Google Cloud?
Moving from bare-metal based data centres to a cloud provider like Google is a significant change/undertaking. However, we believe this move is worth being made because of the following substantial benefits of the Google Cloud platform:
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.
Distributed storage for high data redundancy
Another advantage of the cloud setup is distributed storage. We are using Google’s SSD persistent storage, which has multiple redundancies. This means 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 spin up a new virtual machine on another hosting node in our cloud space and attach the distributed storage volume to the new instance, instead of the faulty one, without losing time in backup restores. We can now store a daily backup for 90 days where our previous infrastructure only allowed us to store 30 days worth.
Easier scaling and resource management
We have prided ourselves on 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 are also much easier. This allows us to achieve the results we are looking for with much less investment in idle resources and management overhead.
Multiple opportunities for new data centre locations
Working with Google Cloud allows us to quickly add new data centre locations outside the regions we currently operate in. Currently, we have a three-tiered approach with London (UK), Europe (Amsterdam) and America. However, we now have the ability to extend this to 54 countries around the world, with Google building and expanding data centre locations all of the time.
Strong commitment to carbon neutrality
Google matches 100% of the energy consumed by its global operations with renewable energy and maintains a commitment to carbon neutrality. We believe this is a precious benefit not only for our clients but for the whole planet. This also ties into our personal office goal of reducing our carbon footprint this year. We have already switched electric providers to Bulb, who provide 100% renewable energy, switched to recycled paper, reduced unnecessary printing, and now only working with green-conscious printing companies.
We are genuinely excited about the official start of our journey with Google. We will be keeping you updated on its development whenever a new location is added or when we have completed our full migration to the Google Cloud data centres.
