How Can Our New Managed Cloud Platform Benefit You?

Liquid Web’s new Cloud Platform is an environment designed with website uptime, ease of use, and scalability in mind. It combines the easy-to-use cPanel-based environment with a Load Balancing solution. It can be adjusted to suit your specific online needs. This platform is also included in our Fully Managed Support. Experienced webmasters or developers can opt for our Core-Managed environment, using the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP). 

The building process for our Cloud Servers is automated. This allows you to pick the environment you choose and have it built in a matter of minutes. You can also scale the environment up and down when you need to, allowing you the flexibility to add or remove web nodes when you need them most. Load Balanced solutions also have failover mechanisms that keep your website running. Even where there is heavy traffic or if a web node needs to be restarted. We can offer a virtual Load Balanced solution at a lower cost. This is because of the automated build process and no physical hardware to employ. Let’s take a look at how it all fits together.

How Liquid Web’s Cloud Platform works

When a new Cloud Server platform builds, it employs three types of nodes. The platform consists of the following elements.

• Load Balancer: The Load Balancer node is responsible for taking requests from the internet for your websites and distributing that traffic among the web nodes.
• Web App Server Nodes: The Web Nodes are solely responsible for processing those requests and serving the web pages back to the website viewer
• A Primary Node: The primary node handles all website data and files

In the diagram below, the Load Balancer will take requests and pass them to the Web App servers 1 and 2 for processing. The Web Apps then process the information stored on the Primary node and serve them back. Web Apps 3 and 4 (or more) can be added on the fly when needed, allowing more requests to be processed. This functionality is accomplished through your My Liquid Web portal.

Keeping Your Website Running

One of the essential features of our Cloud Server Platform is its ability to keep a website up and running when expecting or experiencing a large amount of traffic. Many web hosting servers, whether they are a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a dedicated server, require a great deal of server-side processing to serve a modern webpage to its visitors. Most of the processing is handled by the webserver software like Apache or Nginx. This load can be quite taxing on a server’s resources when the same machine runs it. The Liquid Web’s Cloud Platform separates the website’s processing from the primary node, effectively removing the need to process it on the same server. So, the primary node can focus solely on handling the web pages’ files, and the web nodes can process the pages for the visitors.

The Load Balancer also plays a vital role in making sure that your website remains available. When a request comes into a website and initially reaches the Load Balancer, the Load Balancer passes the request along to an available web node. The Load Balancer distributes the web traffic evenly across each of the web nodes to ensure a uniform loading experience each time your website is visited. The Load Balancer also stays in sync with each web node’s responsiveness. If for some reason, your web node fails or does not respond correctly, the Load Balancer will reroute traffic to another node that is responsive to ensure that your website is being served up to the visitors. This feature is one of the most critical elements of any load balancer since it ensures that your website is always available regardless of the individual web app nodes’ state.

Fast Build Time

When we think about the most typical load-balanced solutions, we often think about it being built within a physical server-based solution framework. Since these servers are not automatically provisioned, they first need to be physically built and configured. This process is time-consuming and requires hardware selection, software configurations, and human resources to implement it. All in all, a physical load-balanced solution can take days to construct and configure in a specific working environment. Even though these setups function similarly to a Liquid Web Cloud Platform, the individual servers must be configured to their particular role and specific task. 

Liquid Web’s Cloud Server Platform removes this equation’s physical build and configuration aspect, significantly shortening the build time to begin serving up web pages. Instead, provisioning a Cloud Server Platform is an automated process. Once you order a Cloud Server or make changes to it, the environment itself handles applying the modifications, instead of an individual or team. This means we can set up a Cloud Server Platform rapidly and easily with a few clicks in our My Liquid Web account. 

Furthermore, we can provision additional web app nodes when you need them in the same fashion. There is no need to change anything on our website to make it work since it will take care of the configuration details. All we need to do is make sure that the website’s IP address is pointing to your Load Balancer’s public IP address. 

Ease of Use

The Cloud Server platform allows us to create content without becoming a system administrator to work within a Load Balanced environment. Our Fully Managed Support also includes the popular cPanel management panel. So if you have used cPanel before, you understand how easy it is to get a website up and running. 

This allows us to focus on generating the content, handling orders, and tending to your customers instead of configuring a server since the platform handles everything else. Setting up a new Cloud Platform is achievable through a few clicks through our website’s ordering process. The configuration and additional changes automatically apply when and where you need them to. So, you don’t have to make any further changes through the command line when you need to scale up or down.

We also offer a Core-Managed environment for those with different web hosting needs (minus a control panel), but the same rules apply. You can still focus on your website instead of configuring your environment. The Load Balancer and Web App nodes are still automatically configured when they are built or added. Even though you may need to access your server via the command line from time to time to make changes, you only need to do this on the primary nodes instead of each added web app node or load balancer.

Scalability

As your website’s traffic grows, your environment can grow with it. Let’s say that you are running a promotion on your website to sell your products, and it is mentioned on a popular social media site. This situation often generates a massive influx of internet traffic to a website and requires an immediate need for more processing power. With a managed Cloud Server, we can add additional resources quickly and easily by adding new web app nodes. Once the web app node is added, the load balancer and the primary node will automatically adjust to the additional resources.

But what happens when the promotion is over? We are glad that you asked! Cloud Servers also allow us to scale down in size as quickly and efficiently as we scaled up! This means that we only pay for what we need when we need it! When your promotion is over, and you no longer need the additional resources, we can remove them through your My Liquid Web Portal just as easily as when we added them.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there are many ways that our Cloud Platform can benefit your business! Our time-saving automation helps save time and money when a Load Balanced web hosting environment is needed. Not only that, but the included control panel can assist us in quickly creating websites and applying changes when we need them most. Liquid Web’s Cloud Platform also allows you to control the flexibility of adding and removing web app nodes when you need to scale up or down, so you have the power you need to make the changes easily. More importantly, you can add additional resources in a matter of minutes to handle the immediate resource needs. 

Worry-Free Fully Managed Support

Our Support Team is full of Helpful Humans that are ready to help you out anytime. You can always get a hold of us when you are running into an issue or if you have any questions. We’re staffed every hour of the day, every day of the year. If you’re unsure how many web nodes you need to add or how to add them, ask us! Whether you have a Fully Managed or Core-Managed solution, we’re still here to help scale your web hosting solution to your business needs.

If you are a Fully Managed VPS server, Cloud Dedicated, VMWare Private Cloud, Private Parent server, Managed Cloud Servers, or a Dedicated server owner and you are uncomfortable with performing any of the steps outlined, we can be reached via phone at @800.580.4985, a chat or support ticket to assisting you with this process.