In the last few decades, Cloud Computing and cloud technologies have flourished in IT ecosystems. The Cloud helps achieve easy accessibility, cost efficiency and high reliability. The same cloud technology is now adopted by hosting providers to offer Cloud Hosting Plans. These Cloud Hosting plans bring forth the same underlying advantage of accessibility, economy and reliability to the hosting environment. In the last few years, Cloud Hosting has gained a lot of popularity, especially for growing sites that tend to receive high traffic and may require high scalability on a short notice.
But the question that comes to the mind of many potential adopters is what Cloud Hosting is and how it works. This post is designed to address just that. Once you have a better understanding, you may be able to judge its compatibility to your website requirements and then decide whether or not you want to get a Cloud Hosting package.
What is Cloud Hosting?
The primary unit of Cloud Hosting is the ‘Cloud’. Cloud is simply a cluster of servers, interlinked with each other that work together to form a single large and very powerful server via a process called virtualization. When it comes to understanding what Cloud Hosting is, it is simply put forth by the principle of ‘Divide and Rule’. This means is that all the resources needed to run and host a website are divided and distributed across multiple servers on the cloud. This helps avoid a single point of physical failure and makes the overall hosting a lot more reliable.
As we already noted, Cloud Hosting services provide hosting on virtual servers which pull their computing power from underlying networks of physical web servers. With this, you as a client can tap into their service as much as you need to, depending on the requirements at that stage. This can result in cost savings as you only have to pay for what you use.
How Cloud Hosting Works
In Cloud Hosting, you will usually have the option to go with a Public Cloud or a Private Cloud. The public Cloud is similar to Shared Hosting in concept where the collection of networked machines hold the data for several sites. The hardware is shared between other virtualized accounts, and so the cost of the resource is shared.
Private Cloud Hosting on the other hand, is a setup that does not share its infrastructure with any other sites. This obviously comes at a higher cost, but offers greater security and control.
Advantages of Cloud Hosting
- Scalability: Since you have a pool of server resources all interconnected with each other, adding and removing resources is fairly easy. This is especially good for sites that need resources to be scaled instantaneously like news sites or even ecommerce websites during sale periods.
- Reliability: As all the resources are distributed across multiple servers, there is never a single point of failure. In case one server goes down, the Cloud automatically offloads the tasks on to the other servers in the pool, thus mitigating the threat of hardware failures that can lead to website downtime.
- Load Balancing: At times if the server is loaded with requests and the resources fall short, the website load times increase. Also, there are chances of downtime because of lack of resources or storage space. Such a situation is managed well because the Cloud evolves as per the load. In case the allocated virtual resources for a website prove to be inadequate, the system automatically balances the load by gathering more resources from the cluster of servers.
- Lower Cost: Since the resources are pooled, it becomes more affordable for small businesses & startups. Hence Cloud Hosting is comparatively cheaper, taking into account its performance specifications. Moreover, you have the option to pay only for what you use which can help you keep your Hosting bills in check.
Well, there you have it. Hopefully by now you must have gained a better understand of Cloud Hosting and how it works and the kind of advantages it brings to the table. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to share it in the comments section below and don’t forget to share this post if you find it helpful! Until next time, cheers!
