There are lots of options when it comes to hosting an Umbraco site, and considering the benefits of website hosting infrastructure isn’t the most exciting subject for many Marketing Managers, it’s important to ensure that you have hosting that meets your needs.

In this post we’ll take a look at 5 of the most common hosting platforms available for Umbraco.

Umbraco agency managed hosting platforms

Many specialist Umbraco agencies and Gold Partners provide their own managed hosting platform.  This can provide you with a one stop solution for your hosting needs, taking away the headaches associated with setting up your site.

With an agency managed hosting platform you may have less complexity, but you may have more constraints, so make sure you discuss with the provider what service levels they provide, who can make changes to the various parts of your site (such as database and source code releases), and what happens when you want to leave the service.

Here at Carbon Six we have our own managed hosting platform based on Amazon Web Services called our Future Hosting Platform.  With the Umbraco Future Hosting Platform each client has their own Amazon EC2 virtual machines which can scale to meet their traffic requirements, while sharing an Umbraco database with other sites.

Umbraco Cloud

Umbraco provides their own cloud based hosting service for Umbraco called Umbraco Cloud.  Umbraco Cloud has been running for around 5 years, and can reduce the cost of developing an Umbraco site, and also provides great functionality such as Umbraco Deploy which is unique to Umbraco Cloud.

Based on Microsoft Azure, in recent years Umbraco Cloud has suffered from reliability and performance issues, and was architected in such a way that large, high profile sites struggled to achieve acceptable performance.  However, the team at Umbraco has worked hard in Q1 2021 to deliver a new version of Umbraco based on modern Azure best practice which promises to be both more reliable and more scalable.

Microsoft Azure Hosting

Microsoft Azure is for many sites a natural home.  Umbraco supports Azure’s App Service which provides a fully managed platform for hosting websites, which reduces the administrative effort needed to maintain a website.  

App Service provides a 99.95% uptime SLA, and in the event of a failure of a single instance will repair the website’s hosting.  App Service is also scalable, meaning sites can be hosted on small low cost servers when traffic is low, and scaled to larger more expensive servers during times of high traffic.  App Service also provides load balancing which is supported by Umbraco, which can provide an autoscaling option, allowing the infrastructure to scale as traffic on the site changes.

We’re big fans of Azure for hosting Umbraco sites, and as a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider we can help clients get their Umbraco site up and running on Azure quickly, following Microsoft best practices.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon provide reliable, scalable and affordable hosting solutions for Umbraco, and for many years was our preferred hosting provider, and for many use cases remains a clear favourite.  Umbraco can be hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) virtual machines easily, and also supports load balancing using S3 and Elastic Bean Stalk, although we don’t have experience of running load balancing using this configuration.

For fast, reliable, single instance hosting, you’ll be hard pushed to beat AWS.

Google Cloud Platform

This is a hosting example we think is likely to be rather unusual, but we share it because it has one interesting feature.  Google Cloud Platform, is as the name suggests, Googles cloud hosting offering.  It’s rarely spoken of in relation to Umbraco hosting, but it is possible to create a Windows Server which is completely Umbraco compatible using Google Compute Engine virtual machines.

But why would you bother doing something so unusual? Because Google provide the cleanest Cloud hosting in the industry, being Carbon Neutral using 100% renewable energy.  Neither Amazon nor Azure come close to this commitment. So whether you’re aiming for BCorp certification or just an ethically motivated organisation, GCP may be the right hosting platform for you.

Learn How We Can Help 

Identifying which hosting provider is right for your organisation and it’s Umbraco site, is a difficult issue for Marketing Managers who may not want to delve deeper into the the technical issues around hosting infrastructure.  The team at Carbon Six Digital can help with this, by working with Marketing and IT teams to understand requirements, make recommendations and if necessary support the migration process. Start a conversation to learn how we can help or alternatively, learn more about our full range of Umbraco development services.

Alternatively, find out more about Umbraco in our complete guide to the CMS.