The difference between cloud hosting and shared hosting.
By: Richard Detering
Tags: Web Hosting Services, Web Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Website, Web Hosting Provider

Photo by Sebastian Bednarek on Unsplash

What is cloud hosting?

Shared web hosting consists of several services on an Internet server that waits for requests from a browser and answers them individually. This is typically a single physical computer in a data center. This process can be problematic, for example, if the system’s resources are fully used due to a cyber attack or the spontaneously increasing demand for a website. In this case, requests are lost and a website is temporarily unavailable for some of the visitors. With cloud hosting, on the other hand, the data is stored on a server network (cloud) instead of on a single computer. This offers many advantages in terms of performance and flexibility.

How does cloud hosting work?

First of all, cloud providers — in addition to numerous IT providers, for example corporations such as Amazon, Microsoft or Google — physically separate their services from one another. This means that a single server is no longer responsible for different services such as databases, PHP and web space. Instead, numerous cloud servers form a cluster that serves as the destination address for requests instead of a computer. Intelligent monitoring continuously distributes the processing load internally to the individual elements. Thanks to its decentralized approach, cloud hosting offers a number of practical advantages such as:

Maximum availability with high performance without down times

Failure of individual servers due to hardware damage, for example, is compensated

High data integrity through the distribution on different networks

Attacks on certain services do not affect the performance of other services

Hardware specialization possible (for example, quick querying of databases)

Optimization of the individual cloud servers for a specific service

Flexibility with a spontaneously increasing consumption of resources

Payment possible based on the computing capacity actually used

The key to efficient cloud hosting is distributing the load across different data centers and networking them with one another. The advantages for providers and their customers justify the inevitably necessary additional effort that the administration of the more complex IT infrastructure causes.

What is the difference between a public and private cloud?

A public cloud is available to all users and is the usual model for small to medium-sized websites and projects. A private cloud, on the other hand, is reserved exclusively for a single customer and is required for complex and computationally intensive applications or websites with very high demand. In some cases, private cloud also refers to applications such as network storage (NAS) or web servers, if these run on their own IT infrastructure. This includes, for example, even a single mini-computer such as a Raspberry Pi in a private household — but this is not related to cloud hosting.

Why does cloud hosting increase security and accessibility?

Attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS), in which a server is to be brought to its capacity limits by a flood of requests, will fail with cloud hosting. In order to fully utilize the performance of such a network, a perpetrator would in practice have to attack all or many websites of a provider in parallel. At the same time, security against physical failures is increased significantly. Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft or Google network data centers with different locations for cloud hosting and use redundant structures in which data can be made available from more than one node at any time. If a single cloud server or even an entire data center fails (for example due to a power failure), other instances take over its work in real time.

What additional services does cloud hosting offer?

Almost all providers enable their customers to combine cloud hosting with other products. These include cloud services such as:

Cloud Server: Virtual Private Server (VPS) with a scalable performance

Software as a Service (SaaS): Programs that run in a cloud

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Complex IT systems that are virtualized in a cloud

Virtual private cloud: An additionally shielded, private cloud within a public cloud

Which cloud hosting providers are there?

Because of its numerous advantages, almost all large corporations such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google have been using and also offering their customers only cloud hosting for many years. Cloud hosting is also gaining ground in small IT companies and in business. Providers often do without their own IT infrastructure and instead rent a private cloud from companies such as Amazon or Google, which they use internally for the company or make available to customers as a public cloud.

Does cloud hosting cause higher costs?

There are different price models for cloud hosting, ranging from a flat rate to a billing based on real consumption. The latter can save costs, especially for smaller projects, but make long-term financial planning more difficult. In conclusion, because of its advantages, cloud hosting is preferable to classic servers. However, if environments such as special programming languages ​​or access to the operating system are required for special applications, dedicated root servers, VPS or independent virtual cloud servers are ideal.

What is shared web hosting?

With shared hosting a large number of customers are accommodated on the same server (computer that hosts websites).

These share the resources of this server, e.g. RAM, CPU performance, hard disk, etc. Sometimes hundreds of customers are accommodated on one server.

In addition, as a customer, you have almost no influence on the settings of the server.

Benefits of shared hosting

Shared hosting plans have a number of advantages.

Most of all, shared hosting is cheap. Since many customers share a hosting server, everyone has to pay relatively little. Private individuals in particular can save a lot of money here.

Shared hosting is often sufficient for small websites. Not every website needs that much performance. Static websites or small blogs, for example, do not need a lot of power.

The host takes care of all the important settings, updates and maintenance work. As a customer, you don’t need to worry about technical details, which is very convenient for beginners.

Often, special, user-friendly tools are integrated that, for example, enable software to be installed with one click.

With shared hosting, the most important services, tools and programming languages ​​are supported. For example PHP and MySQL.

Disadvantages of shared hosting

There are a few disadvantages to shared hosting, however.

The first thing to be mentioned here is the performance (loading time). Even if the host takes measures that distribute the performance of the server fairly across the customer websites, you still only have a small share. And when other websites, for whatever reason, place a heavy load on the server, the other customers suffer too.

Another important point is security. The hosts have taken a lot of precautions here too, but if you share a server with others, there are certain security risks. Once the server itself has been hacked, your own website will suffer as well.

The storage space of a shared hosting plan is often limited. After all, all customers share the hard drive capacity of the server. If you want to host large amounts of data (e.g. photos), you may reach your limits here.

Of course, you can’t really configure anything on the server yourself, after all, that affects all customers. More experienced users will be disappointed with the few customization options.

Comparison of shared and cloud hosting:

With shared hosting many customers use the same web server. With cloud hosting many customers use many different virtual servers. These virtual servers are very scalable which is another advantage.

With shared hosting you can be affected if one of the other customers is hacked for example. In the cloud this cannot happen so security is better.

With cloud hosting you only pay for what you have used in contrast to the shared option where you always pay a fixed amount per year or per month.

With the cloud there’s no downtime for websites in contrast to shared services.

With a cloud contract you either pay per minute or per hour usage. This means that, in most cases, the cloud is the most expensive option.

I hope that by explaining the difference between cloud hosting and shared hosting I have made it easier for you to decide on what to choose. You can always contact me if there are questions, thanks for reading and good luck!