What is cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting is a network of virtual servers managed by your cloud hosting provider. The cloud server’s performance, security, and control are similar to those of a dedicated server. The notable difference of cloud hosting when compared to dedicated hosting is the affordable pricing.
While managed cloud hostings are technically considered “cloud”, often the term cloud is meant to convey unmanaged cloud hosting. Cloud hosting allows your website to be hosted on multiple synced servers, all sharing resources. The differentiating keywords between managed and unmanaged here are multiple and synced.
Advantages of cloud hosting
In addition to its attractive pricing system, which we will cover first, there are several other advantages of cloud hosting:
- Pricing: with cloud hosting, you only pay for the server resources that you’ve used, in contrast to paying a fixed amount monthly. As you don’t have to purchase any hardware, you pay for what you use or need. It’s also a convenient system for businesses who may need to make use of as many server resources (CPU, memory, etc.) needed, and then paying for that rather than having to upgrade a subscription plan to take advantage of more resources.
- Security: your data does not travel through a physical hardware and is instead directly uploaded to the cloud. This significantly reduces your data’s susceptibility to attacks and increases resilience against hardware issues. And unlike shared hosting, you don’t need to worry about the “bad neighbor” effect.
- Speed: cloud hosting offers data isolation, reducing website load time because the data does not need to travel through hardware to reach the searching browser.
- Flexibility and accessibility: in addition to cloud hosting’s pay-as-you-go system, you also have the ability to access your website files from anywhere in the world.
- Scalability: with peaks in traffic to your website, you have the ability to scale up, increasing your resources, in order to accommodate that spike. On the other hand, you can reduce the number of your processors depending on downtime as well.
- Recovery: with cloud hosting you can easily restore data thanks to the servers being armed with powerful data restoration means, such as automatic data backup mechanisms, regardless of your scheduled regular backups.