Cloud publishing or locally hosted page flip magazines? The pros and cons

Saturday, February 4, 2023

Cloud publishing or locally hosted page flip magazines? The pros and cons

When looking into FlipBook solutions you are quickly faced with the question if you want to have your publications hosted in the cloud or if you want to host them yourselves on a local server. Cloud hosting is today’s big buzzword so most automatically choose this without giving it much thought. In this article we provide you with the tools to make an educated choice and motivate it to your boss.

CLOUD HOSTING IS THE EASY WAY AT THE COST OF CONTROL

Cloud hosting is the true turnkey-solution where you get everything you need for your online FlipBook publishing. You don’t have to worry about servers, disk space, bandwidth nor traffic, but some of these may show up on your bill depending on your cloud hosting provider’s pricing. The drawback is that you are dependent on someone else and may not know where exactly your content is stored.

If there is a problem with your FlipBook hosting there is not much you can do except notify them and wait until the problem is fixed. If your content includes any sensitive details you probably want to know where it’s stored and ensure that you can fully delete it when the time comes. To retain full control is one of the most common reasons why companies sometimes decide to host their FlipBooks locally.

SELF-HOSTING DOES NOT ALWAYS SAVE MONEY

If you are already paying for some kind of web hosting it might seem like a good idea to host your page flip magazines there. Why pay for something you already have, right? One however needs to consider that FlipBooks require a lot more disk space than regular websites. Your current hosting may not be ready for the increased disk space and traffic that comes with the FlipBooks or ready to serve readers globally.

When utilizing the offered cloud hosting you can rest assured that the hosting is properly optimized for FlipBooks and their specific demands. Depending on the vendor, you might not even save money by hosting the publications yourself. So if you are not sure that your own hosting is up to the task you might run into unexpected costs and problems.


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THE PUBLICATION LINK IS OFTEN A CONCERN

When you use cloud hosting the hosting provider controls what the links to your FlipBooks will look like. Depending on the vendor you might get your own brand name as part of the URL, but often vendors only use their own domain name with an encrypted ID to identify your FlipBook from the thousands of publications hosted on their servers.

There are however vendors that allow you to use your own domain name together with their cloud hosting. There are also ways to change a FlipBooks URL without physically moving it to another server or domain. If the reader URL is the only reason you are considering self-hosting, you should first discuss the different options with your vendor.

WITH MAGNET E-PUBLISHING YOU DECIDE

At MagNet e-Publishing all publishing plans include reliable high performance cloud hosting by default and without extra cost. The size of the FlipBooks and amounts of readers have no impact on the pricing, so there are no surprising costs. You can however choose if you want your MagNet ePaper publication on your own domain or even on your own hosting server. With more than 10 years of experience in FlipBook production and online publishing, we know what is important and have the skills to provide you with the solutions you need.

With the MagNet e-Publishing cloud service, you can upload your PDF files and have them converted into HTML5 FlipBooks in just a few minutes. If you are trying to figure out a way to increase readers or get your name out there, having a digital interactive magazine on the Internet is definitely a great choice.

Try out the MagNet e-Publishing service.

Your trial ePaper is valid for one week. After this the ePaper will be automatically deleted from our server, but if you like how it works then you can always make a new one!

Try it out!