Cloud hosting

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Cloud hosting is becoming more and more popular and we store more and more in the cloud. Most of us use cloud features every single day. A very commonly used type of cloud hosting is the iCloud on iPhone and the iDrive on android devices that allow us to store our photos and other files in the cloud where they remain safe and available even if we lose our phone. Dropbox is another example of a cloud service that are used by millions of people.

cloud hosting benefitsIn this article we are going to focus on whether cloud hosting is a good choice for your website and whether you should move your website to the cloud and keep it where it located now.

Please understand that cloud hosting brings both benefits and drawbacks. If you are happy with your current hosting then there is no need to update to cloud hosting just because that is a newer technology. Both regular and cloud hosting can be good alternatives and most website will see limited benefits from a move. A small portion of all websites will see massive benefits from moving to the cloud. This primarily includes website with uneven traffic with large spikes.

Benefits of cloud hosting

Scalability

Cloud hosting makes it very easy to assign new resources to your account. You can add more CPU:s, ram and storage space in less then a minute. You never have to wait for your site to be moved to new hosting or for the server technician to update the hardware in your server to make more resources available for you. The resources can be made available when you need them. The same is true if you for whatever reason have assigned more resources then needed to your website. In this case you can scale down with ease. This can be very hard to do with regular hosting since you might have a contract that prevents you from downgrading the hosting.

Reliability

Cloud hosting is much more resilient than regular hosting due to the fact that it is not dependent on any single node. If one server in the cloud has a hardware failure then the other nodes in the clouds steps in and and make sure that everything in the cloud keeps functioning until the hardware error can be fixed. Once the server with the hardware problem have been fixed then it returns to it roles as a node in the network. A website hosted in the cloud will remain online as long as there is not a catastrophic error affecting a lot of nodes at the same time.

If you have your website hosted on regular hosting than the website will be unavailable if the server suffers a hard or software error. It will remain down until the server can be repaired.

Cost

Cloud hosting can sometimes be a lot cheaper then regular hosting. At least if you have a website that has uneven traffic. If you have a website with more even traffic then the savings will be small.

If you have regular hosting then you need to choose a hosting account that is assigned enough resources to be able to handle the spikes in traffic to make sure that the website is always online. You will be paying for resources that you will not need except for when the traffic spikes. This can be expensive.

Cloud hosting allow you to easily scale your account up and down. You can use a cheaper hosting account with less resources assign the it and then quickly scale up the resources available to the website when it gets a traffic spike. You do not have to pay for the extra resources all the time. Only when you need them. Many hosts provide services that automatically scales up your account when needed to make sure your website always have the resources it needs. You only pay for the extra resources when you need them. this allows for a lot more efficient use of server power and reduces the amount of unused resources.