Why are Businesses Moving Towards Cloud Hosting?

What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting is the process of extracting computer resources and organizational storage from a service provider who provides its infrastructure services with a usage model. A cloud provider oversees setup, cloud infrastructure, security and storage, while sometimes allowing clients to customize computer platforms and/or applications and evaluate online servers. Calculation and storage facilities are available for hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) that load the I/O (Input/Output) balance required for cloud infrastructure configuration.

Cloud hosting model is a comparatively inexpensive alternative to a traditional dedicated server model that requires its companies to manage their data centers. In a typical model, servers and storage with dedicated computer systems and virtual resources occupy the premises and are usually very costly with overheads of operational costs for organizations.

How does cloud hosting work? 

At its most basic level, cloud hosting falls under both the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the Platform as a Service (PaaS). Under the umbrella of the IaaS, users are provided with the actual hardware resources needed to integrate their software environment as they build the Web system. On the PaaS side, users are already provided with software that they can install and upgrade the Web system very quickly.

Each server in the cloud setting performs a specific set of tasks. In the event that one server fails, the other servers operate in a supportive way to provide the necessary resources to ensure continuous availability of web hosting services. When you keep your website in the cloud hosting setting, that information is spread across all of the many obsolete features to ensure the website is always available online to you and your web traffic.

Cloud hosting usually provides all the necessary website management features, from cloud storage to data management tools. Many services are designed with non-technical users in mind, offering a genre control panel with many features that make creating and managing a website easier than ever. With cloud hosting you can manage your domains, set up FTP accounts to remotely transfer files, organize information directly, and various other functions.

Difference between Cloud hosting vs. Traditional Hosting 

• Cloud hosting is used to describe how a shared service is hosted on a website. Your website is stored remotely and uses a range of services provided by the hosting service. But you are using a resource pool used by many other websites and cloud hosting users. This can lead to a decrease in performance on your website if another website that uses your same resources requires additional server activity. The result is negative, and very difficult to deal with in a small business setup. However, with cloud hosting, IT departments don’t need to invest in in-house server hardware. And customers don’t need to pay upfront for extra storage or processing capacity that they don’t use. Cloud hosting is more quickly scalable than traditional hosting by design. If an application or website receives more or less traffic, the cloud servers scale up and down automatically. With cloud hosting, there’s no need to manually add or remove server space as there is in shared hosting.
• Traditional hosting comes mainly in two forms, dedicated and shared. With dedicated hosting, the company pays for the complete services of one or more servers from the service provider. The client has a fixed amount of dedicated bandwidth, CPU, RAM, and drive space, and the client has full control over server resources.

With shared hosting, most common among small and medium-sized businesses, the client pays for a fixed amount of space (storage) for one server, and resources for that server are allocated to a number of other websites. It is a cost-effective, low-maintenance way to host a website or application, and the hosting company is responsible for managing, maintaining, and updating the units.

Traditional hosting, especially shared hosting, has its problems though. Because single server resources are shared between a number of different websites, an increase in traffic on those websites may mean a decrease in performance on your own. Violations of security and other operational issues at other sites also increase your risk. And there is one point of failure. If the server itself encounters technical problems, everyone hosted on that server will be affected.

With shared hosting, you also pay for a set amount of storage and processing power. If you have predictable flow of traffic, this might be a good solution for you. But if your traffic is growing rapidly, or if you see a sudden increase in traffic due to a new product or feature, you may be stuck in the amount of storage you have now.

You will need to adapt to purchasing additional server space to add to your storage space and processing power. But if traffic falls again, you will be paying for services which you do not use.

Advantages of Cloud Hosting

1. Increased Server uptime : Server uptime is directly proportional to the performance of your website. Cloud hosting provides maximum network uptime and guarantees no single point of failure. As it is a system of interconnected servers so if at any point, one server is unable to take your request then another one out of the multiple servers will take over the workload of the failed server by default.
2. Pay for the resources as per your needs : In cloud hosting model you do not have to worry about the capital expenditure as you don’t need to invest in any infrastructure and opex is also lesser as you just need to pay only for the resources/services which you actually utilize.
3. Increased security : Cloud hosting comes with such an infrastructure that secures your data at various levels - network, data, application, and physical security. Cloud service providers ensure data safety through customer’s identity management, proper data isolation and storage segregation, secure and encrypted solutions, firewalls and backup recoveries.
4. Scalability of resources : A cloud hosting set up allows sites and accounts to add or reduce resources like bandwidth, storage, RAM etc. from the bank of resources maintained by the network of multiple servers.
5. Backup and disaster recovery : Cloud hosting provides disaster recovery features as data is automatically backed up in an inter -connected server (cloud being a multi server setup).
6. Performance : The site hosted in a cloud environment performs far better than that hosted on a traditional server set up. For those who require speed of loading pages, flexible and immediate resource allocation, disaster recovery plans, energy saving and climate friendly server setup and above all, more in less prices, then cloud is a perfect solution for them.

For your cloud hosting needs, please feel free to get in touch with us.