Businesses and organisations everywhere are making increased use of AI to deliver better products and services to their customers or to improve productivity and efficiency in-house. From photo editing software and banking apps to driverless cars and medical screening, it has an unending range of useful applications. But what about in web hosting? Here, too, it offers numerous ways to improve how websites and applications are hosted, and in this post, we look at what those are.
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Server optimisation
Server monitoring is vital to ensure that your website or apps perform effectively during busy periods. However, when issues arise, making adjustments is often done manually and sometimes after your site has already begun to run sluggishly. For many businesses, this kind of intervention is not fast enough.
One of the benefits of AI is that it can automatically manage your resources. For example, by monitoring your traffic and server load in real-time, it can detect problems early and allocate more resources as required to ensure that your site or apps perform without any issues. Another benefit is that it can use historical data to predict when spikes will happen in the future. When your site or apps are hosted in the cloud, this enables the AI to automatically scale up resources before spiking traffic volumes begin to affect their performance. Additionally, with real-time monitoring, when your traffic levels go down, the AI will scale down resources automatically, keeping your costs to a minimum.
Another benefit of AI is its ability to monitor server health. If problems are detected, the AI will identify what the problem is and implement self-healing measures. Furthermore, where hardware failure is detected or predicted in a cloud data centre, the virtual servers running on that hardware can automatically be moved to new physical machines, ensuring your websites and apps continue to operate without interruption.
Stronger security
A key advantage of AI is its ability to strengthen security. AI-enabled security tools can analyse traffic data around the clock, continuously looking for patterns that indicate suspicious activity, like hacking, DDoS attacks and other threats. Where detected, malicious activity can be blocked, stopping it from reaching your site.
Additionally, AI can carry out deep scans of your website and apps to seek out any vulnerabilities or signs of malware. Again, if any issues are found, AI can automate procedures to protect your site, like applying patching or quarantining infected files. As a result, the risk of you becoming a victim of data theft or ransoming is massively reduced.
Better managed services
Managed hosting is a set of services offered by some service providers, like Webhosting UK, where the host carries out tasks like server admin, software updating, security patching and server monitoring on behalf of their customers. Companies that have a managed hosting solution are thus relieved of these time-consuming jobs, giving their IT staff more time to work on more important tasks.
Not only does AI allow web hosts to automate many aspects of their managed services; it will also enable them to offer a wider range of services to customers in the future. We have already seen automated daily backups being added for some solutions. Automation will also free up hosting providers to work on improving their services and will remove the potential for human error.
Customer support
While good web hosting providers offer 24/7 technical support, AI has the potential to improve and even extend this service. Rather than having to wait in telephone or chat queues, AI chatbots can deal with the queries of many customers at the same time, speeding up the service. What’s more, it can analyse customer responses, so that anyone who needs to speak to a human expert urgently is put through quickly. Less urgent queries, meanwhile, it can take care of by itself, such as answering questions about billing or minor technical issues.
With AI, customer support can also be more proactive. For instance, it can initiate discussions when people visit specific pages or send automated messages to remind customers to backup data, update software or renew expiring domains.
For more ideas about using AI, read: 6 Ways Businesses Use Cloud Computing
On-site benefits
AI can also be highly useful for providing you with insights so you can improve your content and user experience. While standard analytics tools can give you information about page views, bounce rates, visitor demographics, etc., AI can go further. It can analyse patterns in user behaviour and engagement data, showing you where improvements can be made, such as problems with site navigation or content that doesn’t generate engagement. Even better, it can give you recommendations on what changes would make the biggest improvements.
With regard to your content, AI can also analyse what’s already on your site and evaluate how well it meets the needs of your target audience. This also enables it to suggest new topics and content types (articles, infographics, videos, podcasts, etc.) that can attract more traffic or generate more sales. It can also tell you the best times to post new content and how to maximise views through sharing on social media.
AI also has a potential role in boosting SEO. It can analyse search engine ranking criteria and the websites of your competitors to help you find more effective ways to optimise your site. This can include suggestions for keywords and meta descriptions, tips to improve mobile-friendliness and loading times, and identifying unwanted duplicate content.
One area where AI can make a significant difference is with personalisation. While current recommendation engines rely on browsing history and other user data to show the most appropriate products or content, AI will be able to use real-time data to identify session intent. In this way, rather than showing products and content that were of interest on previous visits, it can very quickly determine what the user is looking for now. As a result, your visitors can be given more relevant content.
For more, read: How Visual AI is Reshaping eCommerce
The importance of cloud
Website owners who want to benefit from AI will, in most cases, need to take advantage of cloud hosting. Most AI-enabled applications are cloud-native, which means they have been developed in the cloud and can work effectively in that environment straight out of the box. Moreover, the cloud provides the ideal environment to operate these applications. It offers virtually unlimited storage capacity for the large amounts of data needing to be analysed and it allows on-demand scalability, ensuring these applications always have sufficient resources to deal with periods of busy traffic or carry out high-demand processing. Other benefits include 100% uptime SLA, pay-per-use charging structures and robust security, including firewall protection, data encryption and automated backups.
Too small for the cloud? Maybe not – read: Unlocking the Cloud – It’s Not Just For Big Business
Conclusion
AI is destined to be the most transformative technology of the early 21st Century and will be as life-changing as the internet. Just as every business now needs a website, in the next few years, they will also need to make use of AI to remain competitive and meet the evolving needs of their customers. As we have discussed, the benefits for web hosting and website owners can be significant; however, to deploy such tools, it is vital to put the right infrastructure in place. Today, that is in the cloud.
Looking to take advantage of AI? Get off to the right start with our high-performance, secure and affordable Enterprise Cloud Server Hosting solutions.
