Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting has continued to gain notoriety over the past several years. Unfortunately, many people and businesses still do not understand exactly what it is or why they could potentially benefit from it.
Let’s take a quick look at what cloud hosting is, who needs it the most, and what benefits it could offer you.
What is cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting is also know as clustered hosting and is a hosting solution that utilizes virtualization technologies to create load balancing, security, and to manage system resources across multiple servers.
What makes cloud hosting unique is that instead of relying on only one server, websites and applications can use the resources from several servers at once.
Traditionally, websites are limited by the amount of bandwidth they can use, disk space, amount of RAM available, and the processing power of an individual server. With this type of hosting, these limitations are lifted because the infrastructure can expand to meet the needs of the website.
The simplicity of the scalability means that you can add or remove servers whenever it is needed.
Who needs it?
In the past, many websites have fallen victim to their own popularity and suffer because of a burst in traffic or unexpected boom in popularity.
As soon as the website needs more resources than a server can provide, the website can crash. This type of hosting ensures that this does not happen because a website has access to a group of servers that can provide additional resources when they are needed.
Once the website does not need these resources, they can be used by other websites that are hosted on the cloud.
Any additional benefits?
Here are a few more benefits of cloud hosting:
1. Scalability
Since cloud hosting allows for both forward and backward scalability, websites can use as many resources that they may need during bursts of traffic and share resources with others when they are not needed. This eliminates the chance that websites that are hosted on a cloud network will slowly respond or crash because of surges in traffic.
2. Cost
If you have a website that gets a surge in traffic that you are not expecting then your website could crash. On the other hand, you could use enough dedicated servers to make sure that you always have enough resources.
This means that you would either potentially have your site crash, or pay for all of the resources that you MAY need. This means that 95% of the time, you are paying for resources that your website is not using, because they are only needed with traffic spikes.
Think of cloud hosting like you do your electric bill. You only pay for the electricity you use, and the same is true for cloud hosting. You have all of the resources you need to handle a surge in traffic, but only pay for what you use.
