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Best Cloud Hosting Providers for Mobile APP Development

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If you’re set out to build the next great social media app or you’re creating a groundbreaking e-payment app, you need a hosting that will take into account the special nature of developing for mobile. Thankfully, the hosting industry is prepared to take on this task by delivering you hosting services that are optimized for mobile development and come with features like SDK integration, cross-platform development, and a suite of other tools that make it easier to create and manage mobile applications much faster.

Introduction to Mobile APP Development and Hosting

In the last couple of years, we have witnessed a major shift in the way people access the internet. Mobile internet usage has seen a tremendous growth, with people shopping, accessing ride-share services, making bookings, connecting on social media, and doing a host of other activities almost exclusively on their mobile devices. In keeping with this trend, mobile app developers have been nimble on their feet and responded accordingly to this huge demand for mobile applications. Hosting providers also reacted to these changes, coming up with innovative hosting services that meet the specific needs of mobile app developers.

Although developing a successful mobile application is a rather complex task that may take up hundreds of hours of work, mobile app development has never been easier than today. Each mobile platform has its own software developing kit and sets of specific rules that enables developers to create apps for that specific platform. When you’re building an app, you want it to be able to do a plethora of things such as manage users, synchronize data across devices, analyze user behavior, store and share data, send push notifications, deliver media, get real-times stats about your users, etc. The complexity of enterprise mobile apps dictate the need for a hosting service that allows you to build scalable and reliable mobile apps and backend infrastructure without having to be caught up in the intricacies of managing servers.

Cloud hosting with its enormous computing power, unmatched scalability and reliability has become the gold standard for mobile app hosting. Cloud hosting has become the hosting of choice for giants like Netflix and LinkedIn, who are leveraging the many advantages of this type of hosting.

Benefits of Hosting your Mobile APP in the Cloud

Why did cloud hosting become the gold standard for mobile app developers and which are the benefits you stand to gain by choosing to host your mobile apps in the cloud?

Cloud hosting services have been designed to go far beyond the capabilities of your run-of-the-mill hosting solutions, and deliver on-demand resources due to their unmatched scaling potential and performance-driven cloud infrastructure.

Ditching traditional hosting paradigms in favor of cloud hosting comes with the benefit of increased operational efficiency, reduced costs, reliability, security and scalability. With hardware maintenance, hardware failure issues and resource limitations out of the way, there’s virtually no limits to what you can achieve through the power of cloud computing.

The sophisticated security measures employed by cloud services ensure the protection of your data and the possibility to scale resources means that you can better manage your budget and easily overcome issues brought about by unexpected spikes in mobile app use.

Overview of Top Mobile APP Hosting Providers

In this section of our article, we’re going to present the mobile app hosting solutions of the top app hosting providers in the industry. These hosting solutions inherently scale without you having to manage servers. It doesn’t matter if you have 10 users or 10 million users, these app hosting providers deliver complete, end-to-end packages that basically work out-of-the-box, so you can reach global audiences in an easy and straightforward way.

AWS Mobile

aws mobile app hosting The emergence of AWS Mobile to the Backend as a Service (MBaS) neighborhood was a logical step in the context of the dual shift that the IT market has seen of browser moving to mobile and virtual infrastructure moving to cloud.

AWS Mobile offers developers a complete suite of mobile development tools, testing tools, and user engagement measurement tools. The intrinsic scalability and pay-as-you-go nature of the rich set of cloud services, coupled with the possibility to leverage the entire suite of other Amazon services like S3, DynamoDB, SQS, etc. through Mobile Connectors makes AWS Mobile one of the most complete platforms to build and power your applications. AWS Mobile allows you to leverage multiple SDKs for cross-platform development, create serverless mobile backups in AWS Mobile Hub by using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway.

The AWS Mobile Hub console guides users through the process of configuring and selecting features to build your mobile apps for an integrated AWS cloud services experience that includes end-to-end solutions from building, testing on a large collection of real devices, deploying and monitoring app usage.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform is an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) solution that takes cloud computing to the next level.

Google Cloud Platform is powered by its own Linux flavor, Google Linux. Their services are as wide-ranging as they come offering everything from big data analysis tools to machine learning, management and networking tools. Their main focus, however, is more API related. Often times, their APIs are incorporated in mobile applications but the backend is hosted somewhere else. Nowadays, you can host your backed solution in the Google Cloud Platform and have access to the same infrastructure that powers Google. With their App Engine you can build scalable and powerful mobile apps. If you already implemented your storage and Content Delivery System (CDN) somewhere else, it is still a great idea to look around in their offering. Do you want to implement voice commands? Just use their Speech API that will give you a near real-time feed of the recognized words in the users’ speech. Also, their Vision API is extremely useful if you are working with images, it can do classic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) but also some jaw dropping ones like Image Sentiment Analysis, and feature detection which will identify labels in the images like: dog, grass, border collie, etc. If you are planning to use some of their APIs, then it does make sense to use the whole Google Cloud Platform because the integration will be much easier.

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure is a fast-evolving collection of integrated cloud services – including analytics, networking, storage, computing, mobile – that helps mobile app developers achieve more in a short timeframe. Microsoft Azure goes beyond Windows compatibility and allows users to run Linux containers with Docker Integration, thus appealing both to those who have built their businesses around Windows and those who rely on Linux.

Azure prides itself with having Microsoft-powered datacenters across 30 regions (more than AWS and Google Cloud combined) delivering a wide range of options for running your apps and harnessing the power of the cloud to deliver performance at all times. Azure also support the largest selection of programming languages, operating systems, tools, devices, databases and frameworks. Whether it’s building apps with JavaScript, .NET, PHP, or Python, or build back-ends for Windows, iOS or Android, Azure gives you all the tools you need to do so. Its Azure Stack hybrid cloud platform is aimed at those who want to maintain control of their own datacenters, yet they want to take advantage of the power of cloud services.

Azure also delivers predictive analysis services (Machine Learning, Cortana Analytics, Stream Analytics) helping you to capitalize on business intelligence and make smarter decisions. Scaling up and down as you wish and the pay-as-you-go nature of cloud services are applicable to Azure as well.

Conclusion

The complexity of the above cloud service providers may seem overwhelming at first, but all three providers offer a free tier service that you can use to try them out. In the end, your choice will most likely fall on the one that will meet your specific app development requirements and the one that provides the most comprehensive mobile app hosting experience for your current and future projects.

Published on: January 11, 2017

David Cross

David is the chief editor at WebHostingMedia right from the beginning. He has a great passion for building and managing websites and creating helpful content. He is also interested in programming - currently learning python.