Most apps require a server component – a place to store common data, which is shared with other app users.
If your app is successful, demand on your server could soar. You have to be prepared for success – by all means keep the costs down until revenues start flowing, but the last thing you want is to have your app’s success compromised by poor customer experiences (and reviews) due to inadequate server capacity.
So how do I keep costs down, while at the same time preparing for success?
Short answer – Amazon
Most people know Amazon as the online bookstore, but for several years they’ve also specialised in providing server hosting for online businesses.
Why choose Amazon? Because it starts cheap, but scales easily. While you are waiting for your marketing campaign to attract app sales, your Amazon server will cost next to nothing to run. The lowest Amazon service tier costs between zero and a couple of dollars per month.
But make those app sales, and with a few clicks of the Amazon console, and you can scale up your server to handle almost any imaginable load, within minutes of discovering your server is reaching its limits. With Amazon servers, you won’t see a sudden success snatched from under your nose by poor customer reviews due to inadequate server capacity.
My only criticism is Amazon is it is technically complex to administer compared to a normal ISP account – but that is why you hire techies ;-).
You still have to register your web domain name with a an ISP, if you want a web address for your server. If you are unfamiliar with server setup, Desirable Apps is happy to walk you through the process, and carefully explain the options and costs of every step of building, deploying and managing your app, including configuration and installation of your server.
Contact me today to discuss your app development and app server development requirements. eworrall1@gmail.com.
You really make it seem so easy along with your presentation however I to find this topic to be actually one
thing which I feel I would never understand. It seems too complex and very wide for me.
I’m having a look ahead to your subsequent publish, I’ll try to get the dangle of it!
Thankyou for the compliment :-).
As you say its a very broad subject, and there are options which I haven’t covered.
A big part of the decision is what technical skills you have, or have access to. I love Amazon EC2 because it is so flexible and cheap, but to use Amazon EC2 effectively, you need access to advanced UNIX administration skills.
A normal ISP account is good, if you want to install a few basic scripts, and let someone else worry about the UNIX admin, but you very quickly hit the limits if you want to do anything even slightly unusual, such as install new server software to handle image processing.
If you have access to mobile development skills, and just need a server “bucket” to store data, you could use a service like CloudKit – http://getcloudkit.com/ (note I haven’t used CloudKit myself).
Email me at eworrall1@gmail.com to discuss your specific needs.