If you’re thinking of having a website set up, one of the most important things you’ll need to think about is the type of hosting you’ll choose. It can be quite a hard decision, especially as there are so many choices, from shared and dedicated hosting to VPS and even managed WordPress hosting. Your choices don’t end there. For the final blog in this hosting mini-series, we’ll take a look at cloud hosting, which is a solution gaining in popularity right now, thanks to the benefits of using ‘the cloud’ across so many industries globally.
What is Cloud Web Hosting?
Traditionally, no matter the type of hosting, your website is hosted on a single physical server. This means it is dependent on the performance of that single physical server, with a defined set of resources.
Cloud hosting is unique. Instead of a website being hosted on a single server, the website will instead use the resources of multiple servers, grouped together (or clustered, as it is sometimes referred to). To you and me, this means that your website will use the virtual resources of several different servers, to perfectly accommodate all possible aspects of the website. With this, the load your website experiences (related to the visitors to your website has at a given time) is perfectly balanced, so your visitors won’t ever experience a degradation in performance, such as a slow or crashing website. Also, your website security is taken care of and what’s more, as the resources are available virtually, you will always have the perfect number of resources needed at that time. This group of servers are likely to be found in multiple physical locations and as such, they are known as ‘the cloud’.
What are the Benefits of Cloud Web Hosting?
As we’ve seen, cloud web hosting is a relatively new type of hosting. It is based on the on-demand availability of server (or computer) resources, without needing any direct active management by the user, from data centres located in multiple physical locations, accessible through the internet. As such, it is a fantastic option in comparison to standard hosting, where your website would be based on one physical server, in one location only. Here are the main reasons why.
#1: It is Highly Scalable
When you’ve got a physical server (or computer) hosting your website, you essentially have a fixed set of resources allocated to your website. Whilst you can always add or remove resources, at any given time, the number of resources you have are constant. Imagine your personal computer. It has a fixed hard drive capacity, a processor and RAM memory (random-access memory, which your computer uses to store temporary files, such as when you’re running some software) etc. That’s what you have with a physical website hosting server, be it shared or dedicated hosting. Often, your website will only be using a small fraction of the resources it has been allocated.
The big difference between that and cloud hosting is that it is much more responsive. When your website has a high amount of traffic, it will automatically be allocated more resources to cope with that additional demand. Once the demand drops, those resources will be removed from your website, so you will never pay more than you need to.
Let’s imagine you’re running a website for a popular annual music festival, such as Glastonbury. For most of the year, it won’t have many visitors at all. You might have a few, just to find out information about the festival, but that’s about it. At that stage, you wouldn’t need much in the way of hosting server resources. Even basic shared hosting would be sufficient. However, when it comes to the tickets being released for sale, you know you’ll have 1000s of visitors within a few minutes. For that short period of time, you will need lots of resources, to ensure that the website doesn’t slow down or crash, and that everyone can buy their tickets. However, for the other 11+ months of the year, you don’t want to have to waste money on the higher level of resources, as you just won’t use them. That’s why cloud hosting is perfect, since in those 11+ months, you’ll only be paying for what you need, but when the tickets are released, you’ll have all the resources necessary to ensure you have no service disruption.
#2: It Provides the Resources You Need, Right when You Need Them
With physical hosting, such as shared or dedicated hosting, it is of course scalable. If you know you’re going to need better-performing hosting as your company grows, you can upgrade. Whilst that is useful, it isn’t instant. By that, I mean even if you know your demand is increasing quickly, you must wait for the hosting provider to allocate you more resources, which could result in a disruption to service, leaving you with some very unhappy visitors. The delay between your demand increasing and your hosting performance increasing can be a killer for the public perception of you and your website.
That’s where cloud hosting comes in. When your demand increases, your website’s hosting resources will increase instantly and seamlessly, giving your users a much better experience. They will have no clue your cloud hosting has allocated more resources to the website, yet you’ll have the peace of mind that they will always have the perfect experience. If we take the previous example of the festival website, this is akin to the cloud hosting allocating more resources to your website right when you’ve released tickets for sale and visitors are flocking to it in their 1000s, not a moment before. Once all the tickets have been sold and the demand drops off, the resources will be removed, again instantly. That’s perfect, as you’ll never have the dreaded drop in performance.
#3: You won’t Waste Money Over-paying for Services You don’t Need
As we’ve seen with something like shared or dedicated hosting, you are provided with a fixed number of resources at any given time. That means you’re paying a constant amount for those resources. As a result, if you know you are going to have peaks in demand at certain times, you’ll have to pay for the resources to manage that peak demand. However, when the level of demand drops off, you’re still paying the higher amount. The cost doesn’t reduce when the demand reduces.
With cloud hosting, as we have seen, the number of resources scales up and down reactively and seamlessly. In addition to providing your users with the best experience possible, it means that you’ll save money. You’ll have to pay for the higher level of resources when the demand is high, but you will pay much less when the resources are removed, when the demand is low, which means you’ll never overpay. That’s perfect, right?
So, is Cloud Hosting Right for You?
Many websites start off on a simple shared hosting plan, which is great when you’re not sure of the direction your website will take. After all, why would you want to spend lots on hosting, if you’re not getting many visitors? Let’s imagine your business grows in popularity, as of course we hope it does. You’ll quickly outgrow the resources your shared hosting can offer.
What do you do next? One option is to upgrade to something like dedicated hosting. That will certainly give you the resources you need, although it’ll cost a lot of money and you’ll need some technical know-how. It certainly isn’t budget friendly. That’s where cloud hosting comes in: it is much cheaper than dedicated hosting; it is responsive, so you’ll never pay for more resources than you need; you’ll avoid most of the technical challenges dedicated hosting would throw up. If you find yourself in this situation, you should almost certainly consider cloud hosting.
If you’re interested in getting cloud hosting for your website, check out this resource from WebsiteBuilderExpert. They’ve put together a comprehensive review of the best 9 cloud hosting providers. If you choose one of those, you won’t go far wrong.
How will Digital Lychee Help You?
At Digital Lychee, I make sure that I tailor all my clients’ website to suit their individual needs. In your initial consultation (free and no obligation, of course) we will discuss your needs in full and I can advise you on the best type of hosting to suit your needs and how you can upgrade it going forwards, if necessary. If you are interested in my services, or you want to find out more about my blog, I would love to hear from you. You can get in touch with me here.
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