Are you currently running a website or an online business and looking for a reliable and efficient web hosting service? If so, you might want to consider cloud hosting as an option. Cloud hosting has been gaining popularity over the years, and for good reasons. In this article, we will discuss why cloud hosting is better than traditional hosting and its benefits and advantages for website owners.
why Cloud hosting is better because cloud hosting allows for the content of the site to be spread across multiple virtual servers across different regions, and when demand increases, it is easy to scale. Because of this, cloud hosting is also more robust and reliable than web hosting, while allowing for more flexibility to tune the parameters as needed.
Managed Cloud Hosting Cloudways Bring Productivity Why Cloud Hosting is Better
Cloudways exists to support our customers. More than 80K+ agencies, SMBs, and individuals rely on us to save them time and money so they can focus on their passions and grow their business.
The Cloudways platform features >99.9% uptime, super fast page load time, pro-active app monitoring, dedicated workflows, leading security including add ons from Cloudflare and 24/7 premium support.
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Founded in 2012, Cloudways has 280+ employees from 20+ countries, all of them focused on serving and supporting you.
Cloudways makes hosting easy from the start. When you sign up, you get a free three-day trial period, so it’s risk-free. As part of your onboarding, it migrates your site for free while you follow the simple one-click process for getting set up.
What is Cloud Hosting?
Before diving into the benefits of cloud hosting, let’s first define what it is. Cloud hosting is a type of web hosting that uses multiple servers to host websites instead of a single server. It allows resources to be allocated dynamically across different servers, ensuring high availability, scalability, and redundancy.
Cloud hosting is fairly similar to VPS hosting, but the main difference is that while VPS relies on physical servers, cloud hosting is based on several interconnected servers spread over a wide geographical area. This allows you to spread your data across these widely distributed virtual servers (thus the name cloud) and serve your customers more efficiently.
Where the VPS has limitations on bandwidth and data transfers, cloud hosting usually does not. Cloud hosting is also considered the new, more modern solution to hosting web apps and online businesses, given the efficiencies and advantages. Therefore, it is suitable for most businesses.
Large companies like Google and Amazon host their servers on cloud systems, so there are necessarily advantages to that.
Cloudways, of course, is one of the top cloud hosting providers out there. You can read these case studies and see how people migrated their online businesses and used the Cloudways platform to unlock exponential success. Bigger sites with higher traffic should look into the right Bluehost alternative for affordable solutions as they grow.
Benefits of Cloud Hosting
- On-demand resources: With cloud servers, you’re free to request resources on the fly and, in general, pay on time.
- High availability: Unlike on-premises physical servers, virtual machines transfer data to another machine without downtime in the event of a hardware failure. The stability of cloud servers is unmatched in the field of web hosting.
- Scalability: With more resources and faster access to them, cloud hosts offer incredible scalability for customers. This is why these servers are used for other cloud-based services, collectively known as cloud hosting.
Shared Hosting vs. Cloud Hosting
As discussed, several websites, including yours, share the same server and its resources in shared hosting, which is ideal for projects with little to no traffic and does not require many resources.
The hosting space for individual websites is limited, and one server usually accommodates vastly different websites. In terms of prices, shared hosting is the most affordable because you are just renting a portion of the server space, but the opportunity cost is that you are severely limited in performance and security.
On top of that, if your website starts to see growth in traffic, shared hosting solutions do not scale to accommodate that.
Cloud hosting servers, on the other hand, provide you a secure and scalable solution for your website(s), and you have total freedom in the choice of resources (RAM, processor, bandwidth, and storage) for your WordPress website(s).
Cloud hosting is perhaps the best choice for businesses with medium to high volumes of traffic (especially in holiday seasons). Even if you receive unexpected spikes in traffic due to some viral content or a trending product, your website’s performance won’t take a hit because of the availability of high resources.
Performance
Performance can easily take a hit in a shared hosting environment. If any website on the server consumes the entire available bandwidth, the other websites won’t work, and there’s a chance your site may crash. For this reason, performance may be affected by the number of websites on the server, the overall resources of the server, and how many resources each individual uses. In short, the performance can vary a lot and can depend on many things.
With cloud hosting, you always know what resources you have, and if needed, you can always scale (increase or decrease) your server depending on your budget and needs.
Security
Security on shared hosting may be lackluster because if a hacker gets access to a server, all websites on the server are vulnerable to the attack. So if you’re hosting a website on shared hosting, you have to be really careful with your security level and have to keep a constant check on your security measures.
With cloud hosting, security is less of a concern. While no website can be a hundred percent secure, cloud hosting does enjoy a level of security that shared hosting cannot afford. For example, if you’re hosted on Cloudways, your accounts are protected with firewalls, login security, bot protection, and SSL certificates, among other security measures, so that you’re always protected from malicious attacks.
Price
The price for shared hosting and cloud hosting differ depending on the web host, the bandwidth, memory, and options offered, but it is still possible to identify average prices. The price of shared hosting usually starts around $5 to $15 a month, although it can sometimes go up to $50 a month for some web hosts that offer more resources.
Cloud hosting tends to be more expensive, and there are different payment solutions based on the hosting provider. On average, you can expect to pay about $10 to $200 a month for a good cloud hosting service, but for website owners who need fewer resources, there are cheaper alternatives that cost less. Cloudways, for example, starts at just $10 for high-performing servers and has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, which means that you’re not locked into a monthly or yearly contract, and only pay for the resources you use and not a penny more. Check out Cloudways’ pricing plans to find the right solution for your site.
Dedicated Hosting vs. Cloud Hosting
To begin with, a major drawback of dedicated hosting is that it can underperform during sudden traffic spikes since the resources are fixed and do not scale up as the traffic increases. Once the resource consumption hits the upper limit, the visitors start to see severe degradation in their user experience and “404 Page Not Found” errors.
Although dedicated hosting is still seen as a much better solution than shared hosting, it is not ideal for high-traffic websites that need to offer a higher degree of user experience to the visitors. In many cases, experts suggest that websites using dedicated hosting should consider cloud-based hosting solutions.
Cloud hosting is practical in terms of sudden traffic spikes and situations where the demands for the website resources could go up as the traffic increases. As your website grows, the cloud server adapts and provides the necessary resources to ensure quality service without interruption while guaranteeing the data’s security.
A cloud server is not limited by the physical capacity of a single server (dedicated server) or proximity to neighbors (shared hosting). In addition, cloud hosting allows you to adapt the resources within a few clicks without interrupting the service.
Performance
With cloud hosting, customers can benefit from the best of both types of hosting described above. Cloud hosting makes it possible to adjust resources up or down as needed, making it a much more flexible and, therefore, more financially attractive system. When servers are subject to higher demand, it is possible to automatically increase their capacity to meet the demand, without having to pay for this capacity permanently. It’s like a heating bill: you use what you need, when you need it, and pay only for what you used, after the fact.
Unlike dedicated servers, cloud servers can run on a hypervisor. The role of a hypervisor is to control the capacity and to allocate it where it is needed according to the use of the operating systems. With cloud hosting, there are many cloud servers available for each client. This makes it possible to dedicate computing resources to a specific customer if necessary and when necessary. For example, in the event of peak traffic activity, it is possible for a website to access more capacity until it no longer needs it. Cloud servers also offer more redundancy. If a server fails, the other servers replace it.
Security
The security of a dedicated hosting server is more vulnerable than any other type of hosting as it is solely dependent on the expertise of a user or a sysadmin. Therefore, a user has to monitor the server security, take frequent backups, and install security patches and firewalls. On the contrary, in cloud hosting, the hosting provider takes care of all these security-related aspects so the user can only focus on his website’s content.
Fault Protection
Dedicated hosting is a much more advanced form of hosting, where the customer acquires complete physical servers. This means that the entire server is totally dedicated to him, without having to share it with other clients. In some cases, the client can even use many servers that are all dedicated to him.
While dedicated servers provide full control over hosting, their disadvantage is that the required capabilities need to be planned in advance, with enough resources and processing power to handle the expected traffic levels. Underestimating these levels may lead to insufficient resources during busy periods of activity, while overestimating them may mean paying for unnecessary capacity. Their disadvantage is that the required capabilities must be planned in advance, with sufficient resources and processing power to handle the expected traffic levels.
Price
A dedicated server is more beneficial for customers who want to have their own server websites. With this kind of server, a user can manage his own server and administer it as he wants. Even though prices are much higher, this type of hosting is mainly recommended if you want excellent transfer quality and hyper-responsive customer support. The cost of a dedicated server obviously varies a lot depending on the performance of the machine. However, it can range from $50 to $1000 per month which is costly than shared hosting and cloud hosting.
How Does Cloud Hosting Work?
Cloud hosting works by distributing the load of a website across multiple servers, also known as a cluster. When a user accesses a website, their request is sent to the nearest server in the cluster, which processes the request and sends the response back to the user. This distributed architecture allows cloud hosting to handle high traffic volumes and ensure website availability and uptime.
Benefits and Advantages of Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting offers several benefits and advantages over traditional hosting, including:
1. Scalability and Flexibility
One of the main advantages of cloud hosting is its scalability and flexibility. Cloud hosting allows website owners to scale their resources up or down based on their needs, ensuring they only pay for what they use. This is particularly useful for websites with unpredictable traffic patterns or seasonal spikes in traffic.
2. High Availability and Uptime
Cloud hosting is designed to provide high availability and uptime. With multiple servers in a cluster, cloud hosting ensures that if one server fails, another server can quickly take over its functions, ensuring website availability and uptime.
3. Security and Reliability
Cloud hosting providers often have robust security measures in place to protect websites from cyber attacks and data breaches. They also use redundancy and backups to ensure data is safe and recoverable in case of an outage or disaster.
4. Cost-Effective
Cloud hosting is often more cost-effective than traditional hosting because website owners only pay for what they use. With traditional hosting, website owners often pay for a fixed amount of resources, whether they use them or not.
5. Faster Load Times and Better Performance
Cloud hosting often provides faster load times and better website performance due to its distributed architecture and use of CDN (Content Delivery Network) services. CDN services cache website content and serve it from the nearest server to the user, reducing latency and improving website performance.
FAQ Question & Answers
What is cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting is a type of web hosting that uses multiple servers to host websites instead of a single server.
How does cloud hosting work?
Cloud hosting works by distributing the load of a website across multiple servers, also known as a cluster.
Is cloud hosting more expensive than traditional hosting?
Cloud hosting can be more cost-effective than traditional hosting because website owners only pay for what they use.
Is cloud hosting more secure than traditional hosting?
Cloud hosting providers often have robust security measures in place to protect websites from cyber attacks and data breaches.
Can cloud hosting improve website performance?
Yes, cloud hosting can often provide faster load times and better website performance due to its distributed architecture and use of CDN services.
