There are different types of website hosting plans available, like Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting, Cloud Hosting, Dedicated Server Hosting, etc. As a site owner, before choosing a hosting plan, it is essential to understand your options and assess your site’s requirements carefully.
Today, we are going to talk about Cloud Hosting services and look at how it works to help you decide if your site needs it.
What is Cloud Hosting?
Cloud Hosting is a web hosting service where your website data is stored across a network of servers. Hence, you can potentially use the computing power of multiple machines on the network instead of a single server as is the case with traditional hosting plans. The distributed nature of data ensures optimum data security. Thus, Cloud Hosting solutions are considered more secure than traditional hosting services.
How Does Cloud Hosting work?
In the Cloud Hosting architecture, the data storage is spread across a network of servers while the actual website is hosted on a shared server. The Cloud Host ensures high data redundancy for your site data.
As the data can be sourced from more than one website, there is no single point of failure, and you can manage any failure seamlessly. If a server crashes, another takes its place automatically, helping you ensure uninterrupted site services.
Additionally, Cloud Hosting is highly scalable. Resource scalability of Cloud Hosting benefits growing and high-traffic websites as it allows seamless addition of extra hosting resources as and when required. Resource scalability also ensures cost-scalability. You can start with basic resources at affordable costs and scale-up in tune with your business growth.
A Cloud Hosting service is available in many variants. You can choose between Managed Cloud and Unmanaged Cloud Hosting services, HDD or SSD-based Cloud Hosting services, etc.
Managed and Unmanaged Cloud Services
Running and managing a website requires some technical understanding. Also, a Cloud Web Host offers a range of things that you can do with a Cloud Hosting server. Hence, site owners need the technical expertise to make the most of their Cloud Hosting plans. To make things simpler, a Cloud Hosting provider offers Managed Cloud Hosting services where a team of experts manages all the technical tasks of server management, server upkeep, updates, installation, backups, etc., on your behalf. If you are technically sound or have an in-house team to manage the server upkeep and related server management responsibilities, then you can opt for unmanaged services.
HDD and SSD-Based Cloud Plans
Traditionally, servers had Hard Disk Drives or HDDs. These were replaced with Solid State Drives or SSDs that were faster, more reliable, efficient, and consumed lesser power than HDDs. Cloud Hosting servers are also available on HDD and SSD. You can choose between them based on your site’s requirements.
Why Should You Opt for Cloud Hosting Services?
By virtue of its architecture, Cloud Hosting offers a range of benefits to websites including:
- Better reliability since there is no single point of failure
- Instant scalability of resources to manage traffic spikes with ease
- Better site speeds since most providers incorporate CDN and caching servers to boost speed
- Cost scalability
Summing Up
Cloud Hosting is a powerful hosting option for websites. While most websites can benefit from Cloud Hosting, it is best suited to sites that need responsiveness, analytics-heavy sites, websites of multi-location businesses, etc. We hope that this article gave you a good idea about how Cloud Hosting works to help you choose the best hosting service for your site. Also, remember that Cloud Hosting is a fast-evolving service. Ensure that you are aware of all the new trends before making your decision.
The following video enumerates four prevailing trends in the Cloud Hosting market:
