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With the world on its way to moving online, social and work habits have seen a significant shift, forcing businesses in different industries to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Companies of all sizes need to adjust in order to remain relevant. But how?

Moving Online

If your company is mainly operating offline, youll need to find ways to move into the digital world. For that, you need a server. If you have no experience, it will be challenging to decide between a virtualized server and a physical one. You will need to spend some time researching which type best suits your workload and business needs. But merely moving online will not be enough. Youll need to make sure that your infrastructure is reliable, scalable and cost-effective.

Upgrading Your Infrastructure

Regardless of whether you already have an online presence or not, you should be aware that high availability is critical: Your website always needs to be up and running. Increased downtime can result in broken infrastructure and error pages, and even short periods of downtime can damage your revenue streams.Having a scalable infrastructure allows you to adjust resources as necessary with minimal downtime -- for example, to dynamically increase CPU, RAM or storage size, according to your business needs.

Optimizing Your Website

Businesses used to optimize their websites to handle Black Friday traffic surges. Given the new shift to remote work, they are faced with a permanent Black Friday-like situation: increased orders, high traffic and other challenges. There are many ways to optimize your website and increase its resilience:

Bare Metal Versus Public Cloud

Public cloud servers use a resource pool from numerous dedicated servers; this allows resources to be allocated to virtual machines tailored for the needs of every client. The main reason many opt for cloud servers is that one can rapidly provision resources on demand, which makes them highly flexible, scalable and easy to use.

By contrast, on a dedicated server, also known as bare metal, you do not share resources with anyone. This type of server is a single-tenant machine, private to you, without any interference from other users. Superior performance, no resource restrictions and greater security are some of its benefits. Bare metal servers will not only offer better performance, but will also allow you to customize your settings to improve load times and facilitate optimal handling of traffic. Security is enhanced from the start since because metal servers isolate your data.

Cost-Effectiveness

Aside from trying to increase revenue during this period, most businesses will also try to lower their costs backstage. Although the public cloud seems like a cost-effective option for your small company, its not as cheap as it appears. Most cloud providers charge customers for each gigabyte of data sent between the domains currently in use, which adds up fast. Moreover, the more cloud environments a company operates, the more it ends up costing per month.

To avoid the extra public cloud costs, you could turn to dedicated servers, which offer customization capabilities for hardware and apps. The monthly fee is predictable because there are no additional charges, which helps a lot with budget planning. Compared to cloud environments, dedicated servers offer better performance, enhanced security and customizable settings that can meet your unique business needs. But are they as scalable and flexible as public clouds? Some bare metal providers have moved to a hybrid model that allows almost the same flexibility as a cloud.

The Future Is Online

During these uncertain and turbulent times, moving online is almost a must. However, you should do it right, or you might end up investing more than you gain from it. Choosing the right server type and optimizing it for your needs will be an excellent start for your digital journey.

The rest is here:
How To Best Adapt Your Business When The World Is Moving Online - Forbes