Should I use cloud hosting?
By: Richard Detering
Tags: Cloud, Web Hosting, Cloud Services, Cloud Computing, Web Hosting Provider

Photo by Billy Huynh on Unsplash

The chance that you’ve already heard of cloud hosting is big. In recent years this type of hosting has become increasingly popular. Remarkably, cloud hosting is not a term you can explain one, two, three. Even providers often can’t really give a clear definition of what it is exactly. So, let me first explain what it is.

What exactly is cloud hosting?

We speak of cloud hosting when multiple web servers are being used to host one website. With cloud hosting a set of servers will be in use for one project only. This set is called the cloud.

This type of hosting does not give problems when your website visitors suddenly peak. At such a moment other servers in the cloud take over which ensures that the website can still be displayed.

So I recommend cloud hosting if you have a website where you regularly deal with unexpected high visitor numbers.

Furthermore, cloud hosting is also ideal if you have a website that is popular in different countries. The servers of your cloud hosting provider can be located anywhere in the world, so an American can visit your site via a server in the US and a German can see your site via a German web server. The result is a bit faster load time. This is basically the same effect as a CDN.

Example of Cloud hosting

Perhaps you are also curious to see how it works. I will therefore give an example of how you can see it.

You get all kinds of resources that you can set. Think of CPU, RAM and SSD storage. This is actually your server capacity and storage. You can configure this with cloud hosting exactly how you want it in one or more virtual machines. So you can create a cluster of virtual machines and each of them will have the resources you need.

After creating one or more servers, you can place them in your cloud network so your cloud can start hosting your project.

Now, I often hear people asking if cloud hosting is shared or not. Let’s elaborate on this a bit as well:

What is Shared Hosting?

Shared hosting is a type of hosting whereby the web server is shared with other users. The web server capacity is then divided into pieces so it can serve multiple hosting packages.

Benefits of Shared Hosting

It is relatively cheap

No server maintenance or knowledge required

Disadvantages of Shared Hosting

The capacity is often limited

Other users can cause problems for you

No root access to the web server

There are restrictions for customizations

The differences between the cloud and shared hosting at a glance:

Shared hosting is only one web server while with cloud hosting your website is hosted on multiple servers.

Shared hosting can go offline, cloud hosting will not.

With shared hosting you get fixed resources but with the cloud you can configure which resources you need and how much of each.

Shared hosting is cheaper.

Shared hosting can, unlike the cloud, cause a problem when there is suddenly a large number of website visitors.

Note: cloud hosting can also be shared in the sense that multiple customers are using the same web servers for their websites or projects.

Lately I often hear the question “should I use cloud hosting?”. Well, I hope this article answered your question. If not then please contact me. Good luck!