Cloud hosting is slowly but surely becoming the norm for web hosting with the major providers now offering this service. While there are a few factors that determine whether or not you should use cloud hosting, the following five reasons will have you ready to go with this type of service.
What Is Cloud Hosting?
Cloud hosting makes applications and websites accessible using cloud resources. Unlike traditional hosting, solutions are not deployed on a single server. Instead, a network of connected virtual and physical cloud servers hosts the application or website, ensuring greater flexibility and scalability.
Key features:
- Applications and solutions are deployed on a cloud network rather than an on-premises, single server.
- Resources scale to user needs.
- Organizations only pay for the resources they use.
- Cloud hosting can support SQL (including MySQL) or NoSQL databases.
- Solutions are automated and controlled using APIs, web portals, and mobile apps.
How Does Cloud Hosting Work?
Cloud hosting works through virtualization. It’s a technology that splits a physical server into multiple virtual machines called cloud servers. Then, these connect to create a single network for hosting a website.
Due to its interconnected cloud structure, this type of hosting is also called cluster server hosting.
Cloud hosting’s underlying infrastructure makes it different from traditional web hosting. The latter typically uses a centralized approach, where a single server stores several sites at once.
The main benefits of using cloud hosting solutions include:
- High availability. When one server fails, the rest will cover for it and keep the website running. This makes cloud hosting more reliable than traditional web hosting, where a site has to rely on its server being up at all times.
- Traffic load balancing. When the website experiences traffic, the infrastructure will spread it across the cloud servers. This helps maintain the site performance as it sees more visitors.
- Scalability. With cloud hosting, webmasters aren’t limited to the bandwidth, storage, or computing power available from a single server. They can use additional resources in the virtual environment to support their site’s growth.
- Greater security. Cloud hosting is generally less prone to disasters and physical malfunctions since it uses multiple servers in a virtual environment. Moreover, the load balancing feature can help prevent DDoS attacks.
Considerations for cloud hosting
- SecurityClients should consider a provider with physical/operational, network and system, and application and data security options.
- Sensitive dataEnterprises that work with sensitive data may consider separating data at the hardware level, using dedicated servers or other options..
- SupportCloud hosting providers often offer tools, and some offer specialist services to help manage the cloud-hosted environment.
- PerformanceLatency can sometimes be an issue. Organizations should ensure that they have reliable, sturdy Internet connections.
Cloud hosting from IBM can help you share your content and only pay for the resources you use.
What Types of Websites Use Cloud Hosting?
The usual types of websites that use cloud hosting are eCommerce stores, news publications, search engines or aggregators, social networks, and other high-traffic projects.
Basically, it’s perfect for all websites that need plenty of processing power, bandwidth, and disk space to accommodate many visitors and the high amount of files and data they store.
The cloud hosting architecture makes it easy to anticipate traffic surges – which usually happen during big sales or when a blog post goes viral. The load balancing will ensure that the traffic doesn’t overwhelm the resources of any virtual server.
Furthermore, some of these websites may require tighter security to handle sensitive data, like customer information and payment details.
In this case, they may opt for a private cloud as opposed to a public cloud. It usually comes with a dedicated cloud infrastructure, hosted on a private network to prevent unauthorized parties from accessing it.
For these reasons, web hosts generally charge more for cloud hosting services than shared or VPS, which are usually more suitable for small to medium-sized sites.
Benefits of Cloud Web Hosting
Cloud hosting has become increasingly popular in recent years, and for good reason. Considering it’s recent rise, you probably have a lot of questions. It’s a flexible, scalable, and high performing hosting solution that offers your business a unique set of features.
Below we explore the main benefits of cloud hosting, so you can see if it’s going to be the right fit for your website.
Secure Data
Cloud Hosting provides data mirroring helping you keep your data secure. The data is mirrored on 3 different devices on various drives such that in case of any hardware failure you do not lose your data. This ensures hassle-free data backup and recovery.
Flexible Pricing Structure
In most other styles of hosting you pay a monthly rate regardless of whether to not you utilize all of the server resources. With cloud hosting, you only pay for what you use.
So, if you’re expecting a post to go viral, or your site is receiving an unusually large amount of traffic, you don’t have to completely upgrade your package. All you have to do is scale your resources up during the traffic surge and down once traffic levels return to normal. Instead of having to pay for high hosting fee across the board your pricing matches the total amount of server resources you’re using.
Better Performance
It maximizes the performance of websites and web applications as the load is evenly distributed between the servers connected to the network. The availability of resources is also high as it is not dependent on a single physical server like in Shared Hosting.
Very Easy to Scale Server Resources
With cloud hosting scaling your server resources couldn’t be easier. For most cloud servers you’ll have access to an intuitive site management dashboard that lets you view your site’s performance in real time. You can scale server resources up or down on the spot without having to wait for approval from your hosting provider.
Cost Saving
Although it may initially seem like Cloud Hosting is expensive, when you take into consideration the features it provides, the pricing is considerably more economical. Also in some cases, you only have to pay for the resources you use. Some of the features Cloud Hosting provides are, free data migration, fully managed hosting, resource monitoring etc.
Redundant Server Environment
With most types of hosting your site lives on a single server. If something were to happen to that server, then your site would go offline and you wouldn’t be able to get back online until that server is fixed. When your hosting is redundant a site backup will take over your existing site within seconds. However, not all redundancy is created equal. With cloud hosting, you’ll have a concurrent live version of your website that your host can load immediately.
Incredible Speed
Cloud Hosting servers have low density that helps your website boost its speed along with varnish. Varnish is a web simulator that allows websites to sustain high traffic while loading pages in a super fast speed by caching the static and dynamic content on the web page. It can speed up websites by almost 1000%.
High Uptime and Availability
If you’re using any kind of traditional hosting your site’s uptime depends upon the physical server environment. If it goes offline, then so does your site. Unless you’re utilizing a CDN, which can help to reduce your site’s overall downtime.
Cloud hosting has high uptime built into its structure. Since your site will be virtually using the resources of multiple servers, you can simply be transferred to another server if one goes offline or is experiencing technical issues. Plus, with your ability to scale server resources on demand your site won’t go offline from an unexpected traffic surge.
Good Stability
Cloud Hosting is reliable as data has triple redundancy as a result of mirroring. This ensures that your data on the cloud is secure as well as if the server ever fails, recovering data is easier.
Speedy Server Setup Process
You can deploy a cloud hosting server in record time. Unless you’re signing up for a beginner shared hosting package, it might take some time to deploy your web server. This can be a hassle if you need your site online quickly, or you’re doing a host migration and you’re stuck waiting for the server to be ready.
Disadvantages Of Cloud Hosting
There are benefits from the cloud computing usage but it is undeniable that this system also has some disadvantages. The risks of cloud computing you should know such as:
Bandwidth Issue
Cloud hosting depends fully on the Internet. This means that a company needs to always have the Internet that it can rely on and is consistent. The Internet also has to have a fast connection and good bandwidth for the company to be able to take full benefit of the service. If you live in an area that does not have access to a good Internet connection, cloud hosting might turn out to be less fruitful for you.
Data Mobility
which refers to the possibility of sharing data between cloud services and how to retrieve data if one day the user makes a process of terminating cloud computing services. And there is local storage where the data can be used at any time as needed.
Cloud downtime
The cloud, like any other IT set-up, can experience technical problems such as reboots, network outages and downtime. These events can incapacitate business operations and processes, and can be damaging to business.
You should plan for cloud downtime and business continuity. Try to minimise the impact and the number of outages and ensure the maximum level of service availability for your customers and staff.
Risk of data confidentiality
There is always a risk that user data can be accessed by other people. So data and cloud protection must be good because if it won’t be dangerous for data confidentiality.
Limited Control
The servers that host the cloud services are managed by the service providers. The providers are also the ones who own these servers. This makes it difficult for companies using these services to have the type of control that they want over their infrastructure.
Depends on internet connection
The internet is the only way to cloud computing. When there is no internet connection in your place, or the internet path to the cloud provider is in trouble, automatically access to your cloud computing machine will be disconnected. Now this is where the biggest obstacle is happening in developing countries and remote areas that do not have good internet access. And the weakness of public cloud is where everyone accesses the same server and server and will increase the risk of attack, and down the server.
Privacy
One of the biggest issues of Cloud hosting could be security issues that can arise if a person without some kind of technical knowledge is trying to use the service. You need technical assistance to benefit from the service. Another reason for security issues could arise from using a service that requires companies to share resources.
Vulnerable in the event of an attack
There are lots of arguments against cloud computing one of which is computing because the Cloud Computing work system is online, each component that is on Cloud Computing can be exposed to a wide range, this is a wide open opportunity for attacks on data or activities stored on the server. When an attack is carried out by hackers, the problems that occur are data security, and data privacy.
Low Connection
Does not work well if the connection is slow. The quality of cloud computing servers is one of the most important considerations before we decide to provide cloud computing server service providers. When the server is down or the permorma is not good, we will be harmed because of poor server quality.
Well, that’s the advantages and disadvantages of using Cloud Computing services. Not only the use of Cloud is all just good, there is also a shortage of Cloud. However, never be afraid to use what is called Cloud Computing. What readers need to note is that there is no single safe and good system. If there is a safe and good system, there is no need for a system update and bug fixes.
Conclusion
Cloud Hosting is the future of web hosting. By choosing a cloud-based platform, you can save money and time, while also increasing your efficiency. Cloud hosts are growing in popularity, so it’s an excellent choice for those who want to save money and time. Cloud host companies are making money, which means that you can get a great deal on your services. Finally, cloud hosting is growing quickly – this makes it an excellent choice for busy business owners looking to reduce their costs and increase their efficiency.