Typically, web hosting places your website on a single server with other websites. Especially in a shared hosting environment, you share resources with every other website on the server. That means, every website on a single server competes for a limited amount of resources. In these cases, it could be very difficult to ensure that your website always gets the required resources to serve pages to visitors. Even on a dedicated server, there is still a limit to how much one server can handle. However, cloud hosting has changed that paradigm. In a cloud based hosting service, your website is stored on a cluster of servers. Read on to learn how this switch can have several benefits.
Lower Costs
To start, you should know that cloud hosting could save your website costs hundreds or thousands of dollars throughout the year. Traditionally, shared hosts charge for space on a server with a limited amount of resources. By contrast, cloud server providers use a pay as you go system. That means, you only have to pay for the resources that you use rather than how much resources you could potentially use. The savings can be dramatic because your site could end up using way less resources that you currently pay for on a shared hosting environment.
Growth Scalability
Moreover, cloud hosting providers can scale your website quickly. Since you only pay for what you need, the provider can allocate as much resources as demanded. On the cluster, your website will be able to handle many more visits than shared or dedicated server capacity. When there is a boost in traffic, the cloud hosting platform simple allocates more resources to you website. More importantly, if there is a spike in traffic for any reason, you can rest assured that your cloud provider is handling all of the traffic. The last thing you want to worry about is losing traffic when you are receiving more than ever.
Increased Reliability
Compared to running on one server, a cloud hosted website has a higher chance of staying online. Most cloud hosting solutions are extremely reliable because of their connectivity and infrastructure. In fact, they can offer better uptime guarantees because the website is hosted on a cluster rather than a single server. Some companies offer guarantees upwards of 99% in their SLA. Of course, these agreements are for managed services rather than self managed hosting solutions. In both cases, the increase reliability is a great reason to make the switch. Certainly, these solutions can benefit your website uptime and overall reliability.
Disaster Recovery
Moreover, cloud hosting assists in disaster recovery. If the provider has a multi-server cluster, you will have the ability to restore backups and current versions readily available. The number, frequency and availability of backups are hard to match when compared with a regular hosting environment. This is mostly because share hosts take snapshot backups hourly or daily. With cloud hosting, you actually have multiple versions of your website located on different servers within the cluster. Highly active sites that are constantly changing could benefit greatly from the increased disaster recovery protection.
Improved Performance
In addition to better recovery, the redundancies within cloud hosting allows your website to load quicker from various points on the globe. Previously, visitors would have to connect to the location of one server at the web hosting data center. After making the switch, many visitors can access your website from many points in the cloud. As a result of closer connections, your website loads quicker and performs better in various geographic locations. Of course, the increased performance will lead to more page views and improved user experience. These are all smart reasons to switch from share to cloud hosting.
There are many great benefits to switch from regular hosting to cloud hosting. Providers are working hard to low your costs while improving stability and uptime. Your website can certainly get a boost in capacity, giving you’re the peace of mind that all your traffic will get served. Then, the enhanced reliability and performance will improve your user experience for visitors. Since the cloud can handle whatever traffic you website has, you can spend more time on marketing your website and growing traffic. Finally, the added security will keep your website safe and protected in case of a disaster. You can simply recover the latest version of the website. Making the switch, you can continue to grow the website at a lower cost. Naturally, we will continue to see more websites moving to cloud solutions.
