According to Wikipedia, Cloud computing is believed to have been invented by Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider in the 1960s with his work on ARPANET to connect people and data from anywhere at any time. Though it was invented in the 1960s, Cloud computing gained popularity in 90s. You can say, Cloud hosting is relatively new in the web hosting domain. Cloud hosting is very much similar to shared hosting with other benefits. The cloud hosting can be considered as a better option to shared hosting due to its ability to handle high volume traffic, improved security, reliability, and better manageability.
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Cloud Web Hosting
The cloud hosting is a fully managed servers where you can increase computation requirement CPU or Memory (RAM) to handle an increase in traffic on your website without any downtime. All most all cloud hosting companies give an option to auto scale, it means you can keep paying for your base package, but when there is a surge in traffic on your website, it scales up automatically and scales down when there is less traffic. You only have to pay for the resources you have used for a particular time.
Cloud servers are powered by the cloud computing platform. In cloud computing, there are many distributed resources acting like one, and as an, we get to use those resources when we subscribe to any cloud computing services.
We can divide cloud web hosting in two segments: Linux Cloud Web Hosting and Windows Cloud Web Hosting. In general, if you have built your web application using Dot Net or ASP, you will need Windows Hosting, if you have developed your web application using PHP, JAVA, Python you will need Linux Hosting.
Nowadays Cloud Web hosting service providers, also providing two types of storages: HDD (Hard Disk Drive) and SDD (Solid State Drive). In general, SSD is much faster than HDD and is costlier as well. There are companies who give these options you can choose. You can also choose different storage devices based on your requirement.
Benefits of using Cloud Web Hosting
- Better Scalability: You can scale up or down based on your requirements.
- Better Security: Cloud computers provide better security options than shared servers. Each account is isolated from others so the problem of one account does not impact others.
- Better Uptime: Cloud servers provide better uptime.
- Pay as you go: Pay only for the services you have used for a particular duration.
- No infrastructure Cost: You don’t have to bear infrastructure cost which includes, Server Costs, Hardware costs, electricity costs, etc.
- No License Cost: All the license cost is beard by the Cloud hosting service providers, you don’t have to pay for licenses separately.
- It is managed by the service providers so you really don’t have to worry about server management and maintenance.
- Most of the Cloud web hosting companies provide free emails with web hosting.
- Most of the Cloud Web Hosting companies offer free domain name with their package at least for one year.
Disadvantages of using Cloud Web Hosting
- Cost of Cloud servers is generally higher than shared hostings.
- Limited access to infrastructure and you are still bound with terms of usage of the service providers.
- No access to infrastructure.
- You store your data with the third party.
- Software updates depend on the service provider of Cloud Web Hosting. The service provider decides when to update software.
Who should use Cloud Web Hosting
Cloud web hosting is best suited for small to mid-size organizations. Cloud hosting is generally best suited for those who see a jump in traffic for a specific time. A typical example is event management companies. They generally get traffic at the time of events, if a company is organizing quarterly events they may get sudden traffic for registration of the event after the event generally the traffic reduces. The other example could be companies who have started gaining traffic, so before moving to dedicated hosting cloud hosting could be a better option.
