In the past, your hosting options consisted of shared and dedicated hosting. But there is a powerful new option at your disposal today – cloud hosting. Many people have heard of cloud hosting; but few can explain what it truly means.
In this article, Webhostingology, shows us what it means to be limited to Shared Hosting and how your site can benefit from migrating to a Cloud Hosting plan.
What is Shared Hosting?
Shared hosting is a hosting setup whereby several sites are hosted on the same server. These sites share the cost of maintaining the server. For this reason, this hosting method is very affordable, which happens to be its greatest benefit.
The downside is that shared hosting is not ideal for sites that need lots of server resources or special hosting features. These users are better off using dedicated hosting, but that comes at a higher price. In fact, when using shared hosting, you have to remain with specified resource usage limits or risk service interruption.
According to Webhostingology, some of the benefits to using shared hosting include email and web mail services, basic technical support, updated MySQL and PHP, and automatic script installations. However, the host usually provides the server management services; although system administration privileges are given to many users.
A lot of companies provide shared hosting services. While some of these providers are small operations with a few clients, others are multinational corporations. Private shared hosting is also an option in an arrangement called cooperative hosting.
What is Cloud Hosting?
“The cloud” is the driving force behind cloud hosting; which should explain the name cloud hosting. A cloud consists of several machines, or servers, working together as one. The benefits of cloud technology, therefore, include better scalability, improved performance, and more reliability.
But one of the most prominent benefits of cloud hosting is scalability. With regular hosting paradigms, when a site gets too large, the server can get overwhelmed. Cloud hosting handles such issues brilliantly – the cloud-based servers automatically allocate more resources to the site that needs them.
In fact, cloud hosting is infinitely scalable. Cloud hosting also improves site redundancy in that even if a server fails, other interconnected servers are there to pick up the slack. Therefore, cloud hosting provides the best service guarantee a site owner could ever need.
Is Cloud Hosting same as Dedicated Hosting – Virtually?
Some people mistakenly think that cloud hosting has no performance improvements to offer in comparison to shared hosting. The truth is that with cloud hosting, server resources such as SSD storage and RAM are optimized for the user only.
That is not what happens with shared hosting, where access to server resources is restricted based on predetermined limits. In fact, cloud hosting is a lot like dedicated hosting as far as performance goes. However, there are some parallels between shared and cloud hosting.
For instance, everything in a cloud hosting platform can be managed from a single control panel. This is also what happens with shared hosting. Actually, to the website, as far as administration and deployment of application goes, cloud hosting is no different from shared hosting.
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“But in reality”, as Alex Papaconstantinou, from Webhostingology.com, suggests, “a cloud hosting set up gives your website access to more resources. In short, cloud hosting offers scalability, security and reliability, while shared hosting does not”.
