Where to Host the Backend of Your Mobile App

Whether you are building the next great social media app or a groundbreaking e-payment app, you will need backend hosting for mobile apps that will take into account the special nature of mobile development. Fortunately, the hosting industry is prepared to take on this challenge by providing hosting services that are optimized for mobile development and come with features such as SDK integration, cross-platform development and a wide array of other tools that make it easier to create and manage mobile apps. Let’s take a look at some potential hosting candidates for your next big app.

Background

Over the last couple of years, we have seen a big shift in the way people access the world wide web. Mobile internet usage has increased significantly, with people shopping online, accessing ride-sharing services, booking reservations and many other activities almost exclusively on their mobile devices. In order to keep up with the trend, mobile app developers have been quick on their feet and responded accordingly to such an increase in demand for mobile apps. Hosting providers have also responded to these changes by coming up with innovative hosting services that meet the specific needs of developers.

Taking into account that developing a successful mobile app is a rather complex process that can take up hundreds of hours, mobile app development has never been as easy as it is today. Every mobile platform has its own software development kit and a set of rules that allow developers to create apps for that particular platform. When creating a mobile app, you would like it to do a whole lot of things – manage users, synchronize data across all devices, analyze user behavior, send push notifications – and the complexity of enterprise mobile apps dictate the need for a hosting service that will allow you to build scalable and reliable mobile apps as well as the backend infrastructure without having to be caught up in all of the nuances of managing servers.

Cloud hosting with all of its enormous computing power, unrivaled scaling and reliability has become the gold standard for backend mobile app hosting. It is the hosting choice of industry giants such as Netflix, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many others who are leveraging the advantages of cloud hosting.

Benefits of Hosting the Backend on the Cloud

Why is a cloud hosting the gold standard in backend mobile app hosting and what are the benefits of hosting it on the cloud? In order to answer this question, let’s keep in mind that cloud hosting services have been designed to go above and beyond the capabilities of the usual run-of-the-mill hosting solution and provide on-demand services due to their unmatched scaling potential and performance-driven cloud infrastructure.

When you ditch the traditional hosting paradigms in favor of cloud hosting you receive increased operational efficiency, reduce mobile app hosting fees, reliability, security, and scalability. With hardware maintenance, you have to deal with a flurry of issues and resource limitations whereas there are virtually no limits to what you could achieve with cloud computing.

Top Backend Hosting Providers

Now let’s take a look at the top backend mobile app hosting solutions from the top hosting providers in the industry. They offer various tiers of services that include free mobile app hosting and, best of all, they inherently scale without you having to manage servers. Regardless of whether you have 10 users or 10 million users, these app hosting providers complete end-to-end solutions that work out-of-the-box, allowing you to reach global audiences in an easy and straightforward way.

AWS Mobile – AWS Mobile offers developers a complete suite of mobile development, testing, 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.

Google Cloud Platform – The 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.

Microsoft Azure – This 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 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.

While the complexities of the cloud service providers may sound overwhelming at first, all three providers mentioned above offer you ways to try them out for free. When all is said and done, your choice will depend on the provider that meets your specific app development needs and the one provides the most comprehensive mobile app hosting experience for your current and future projects.