Why is cloud hosting gaining popularity?

What is cloud hosting?

Cloud hosting is the modern hosting type that has gained tremendous popularity over the past few years. This is because of its innovative way of using the resources needed to maintain your website. The resources are spread across more than one web server, unlike previous types, and are rendered as and when your website needs them.

This prevents the system from getting affected by any server malfunction as it does not depend on one server. Having said that, we come to another significant aspect of Cloud Hosting. It lets you manage high loads with least efforts and you hardly face bandwidth issues, since there are backup servers with additional resources in case of high loads. So instead of relying on just one server, your website rests on a cluster of servers, called “the cloud”, that work together.

Google.com -- the best example

There is no better real-time example of cloud hosting than Google itself. The world's top search engine has got its resources distributed across many servers on the cloud. That is the reason why you never experienced any downtime while surfing on Google.com during its nearly two decades of existence. Not even once was it down for maintenance, except for AdSense and AdWords.

How it works

As described above, cloud hosting has different servers carrying out tasks particularly set for them. A ready backup server – or servers if required – chip in for a failed server in the cloud, rendering the resources required. The same server backup comes to rescue in the event of an overload.

It is important to note that the server hardware must be of a high quality to avoid any hindrance to the performance, which makes it essential to beware of cheap hosting. Quality is a prime focus, especially when it comes to enterprise-level hosting services. Therefore, genuine enterprise cloud hosting providers ensure that their cloud services are of high quality and more reliable than dedicated servers.

Cloud Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting & VPS Hosting

Comparing it with other forms of hosting helps us understand advantages of cloud hosting and cloud server.

When you pit dedicated servers against Cloud Hosting, you can see that the latter is way more reliable than the former. It is because of the multiple servers at its disposal, unlike the single dedicated server, that it can survive any kind of crisis without breaking a sweat. Although the pricing for either server varies according to your actual usage, the costs for cloud architecture are a little on the higher side; but then it provides value for that extra money with a higher resilience.

When it comes to a comparison with VPS Hosting or traditional shared hosting, cloud looks expensive. Here too, it beats VPS with its high reliability. A VPS hosting has multiple chunks on a single server allotted to different users to manage, which keeps the capital investment reasonably low. That is also the reason why VPS Hosting is mostly advised for customers whose priority at the time of purchasing is cost-effectiveness and not reliability so much.

Features and Benefits

Cloud Hosting is beneficial in many ways in spite of its high price. Let us look at the top 4 benefits.

1. Reliability: This is the biggest advantage of this form of hosting as it has a backing of an extensive network of physical servers. Its multiple virtual servers continue to draw resources from the remaining network if one of the servers go offline.

2. Security: The physical servers that support the system are housed within the data centres of the facilities and so are protected from the risk of unverified access and disruption.

3. Scalability: Because availability of resource does not rely on the capacity of one server, when a client’s website has demand for extra resource, the resource can be accessed seamlessly.

4. Load balancing: It provides load balancing that instantly responds to changing demands.

The future

Cloud hosting has been a great facility with huge advantages for many large enterprises over the past decade or so. There also have been several modifications over these years, which have helped businesses enormously. However, the prices are still too high for most small businesses to buy the high reliability it provides.

Meanwhile, these smaller businesses have become aware of the tremendous advantages of cloud hosting for their enterprises. Providers too are seen making attempts to bring down the prices over the past few years. This has led to small businesses gradually making a move to the cloud arena.

In fact, several of them have already moved to the cloud which is, no doubt, a worthy investment. At the same time, there are still many others who are yet to get the infrastructure required for a transition to the cloud. It is obvious that the cost factor is still holding them back.

Conclusion

The rapidly growing popularity of Cloud Hosting, and deservedly so, will definitely see a sizable number of businesses – and ultimately all of them -- making a shift to the cloud. This transition is sure to happen also because cloud developers have been pretty successfully working on developing new low-cost cloud implementations. Who knows, everyone will be in the cloud soon!