Using the eNlight Cloud platform, you are effectively able to develop your own data centre within the context of a Cloud hosting environment. eNlight is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution that hosts Cloud virtual machines, but also offers a range of additional features that allows you to network your VMs together much in the same way that you would with physical dedicated servers in a data centre. Being able to connect servers together is intrinsically important if you want to achieve particular configurations, for example if you are looking to achieve a load balancing setup in the Cloud then you would need to network all of these servers together so that they can communicate with one another effectively in order for traffic to be routed to the right location. Furthermore, allowing your VMs to communicate through an internal vLAN improves the security of your data, as it will be incredibly hard for hackers to eavesdrop on these connections.
Practically unlimited resources
A key characteristic of most Cloud environments is that the resources available are virtually limitless. Whilst in reality the availability of resources is limited by the hardware that forms the Cloud, if these begin to run low then web hosting companies simply add additional hardware to the Cloud to extend the resource pools. If you are going to be developing your own data centre in the Cloud then resources should be one of your top priorities so that you can add additional VMs to your account when there is a need for additional capacity.
Internal networking
If you have multiple VMs in the same Cloud then the most secure way in which you can get them to communicate is through an internal vLAN that features your VMs only. vLANs are one of the core features of the eNlight platform and can be used in the development of configurations that mimic what can be achieved when using dedicated servers rather than the Cloud.
Control
With the eNlight web-based control panel, you will have full control of all the VMs hosted under your account. If there is a need for additional capacity for your website then you can easily create new VMs that can be added to your Cloud, or alternatively you can extend the resource allocations of your current VMs without incurring any downtime. Compared with running a centre of dedicated servers, a virtual data centre can also provide benefits in terms of deployment times; rather than having to wait for a dedicated server to be setup, a virtual server can be provisioned almost immediately. Having this level of control through a web browser means that you can control your virtual data centre from any computer at any location, the benefit here being that if there are issues then you can rectify them in a fairly short amount of time.