What Is Cloud Hosting and How Does It Work?

Deciding how and where to host your website is one of the first decisions any new business owner, blogger, or entrepreneur will make. Cloud hosting is becoming increasingly popular, and our comprehensive guide will let you know if it’s right for you.

Cloud hosting involves storing your website’s data across multiple servers. You’ll be sharing server space with other organizations, but resources for all sites are split across multiple different servers in order to balance loads, more efficiently manage peaks in traffic, and maximize uptime.

Cloud hosting utilizes a series of physical servers that can be split out into multiple ‘virtual servers’. These are segregated environments on which your website will sit. If one site experiences a spike in visitors or a strain on resources, it can dip into multiple different physical servers to boost performance.

This way, no single website can hog all the processing power on that server. Users can easily scale their bandwidth requirements up or down depending on the size of their site.

The majority of users tend to be smaller sites on shared plans that have outgrown their old hosting packages. If your website has become more popular, or your business has seen a growth spike, it’s probably worth taking the step up to cloud hosting.

It’s a good choice for medium-sized businesses that run busy e-commerce stores too, as well as those that are expecting more than 10,000 monthly visitors. Plus, it’s becoming popular with corporate websites and those looking for more flexibility from their hosting plans.

• Easily scalable - Since you’re tapping into a pool of shared resources, it’s incredibly easy to scale your website up or down in line with your business needs. If you’re expecting a spike in traffic, you can simply get in touch with the customer service team and your hosting package can be increased in no time at all

• Flexible pricing - Related to the scalability point above, cloud hosting comes with a very flexible pricing structure. Essentially, you’ll only ever pay for the bandwidth you use and you can easily switch between different packages as and when needed

• Performance boost - Cloud hosting represents a significant step up over its shared hosting counterpart. Since it’s set up to share resources more evenly and has a pool of backup servers to draw from, you’re much less likely to experience site slow-down. Plus, it stops other websites that share the server space with you from stealing all the resources during spikes

• Redundant servers - In a shared hosting environment, if your server goes down, your website goes down. Luckily, in a cloud environment, if one server goes down, your site will remain live by switching to another cloud server. In many instances, you can even switch to servers housed in another data center, greatly increasing your business’ continuity resilience

• Access to expert customer service - Users of cloud hosting get access to a team of specialists that manage the day-to-day maintenance of your site, including security and software patching. It takes a lot of the stress out of hosting, freeing you up to focus on making improvements to your business

• Quick deployment - Cloud hosting solutions are incredibly easy to set up, and most can be up and running in no time. This convenience is making it a popular choice for new website owners and veterans alike

• Almost unlimited storage capacity - One of the best things about a cloud set up is that you can expand your storage requirements at any time and the process is quick and easy

• You’re dependent on the internet - Having a good internet connection is vital in any cloud hosting solution. If your internet connection goes down, you could lose access to your website. Make sure you have a contingency plan so your business can continue to operate of your connection goes down

• Limited control - As the cloud environment is totally managed by the data host, you’re a little limited in terms of the applications you can install on the server. Customization can be a little difficult too, especially if you have complex or bespoke systems in your current environment. However, if you opt for an unmanaged service you’ll have a little more control

Cloud hosting is fast becoming the backbone of the web hosting industry and is a popular middle ground for those looking for a platform that has more processing power than shared hosting, but isn’t as complex as VPS. It’s a great choice for growing and medium-sized businesses as well as those that are looking for a little extra boost to bandwidth and storage.

Cloud hosting might be a little more than smaller sites need, which would be better off on shared packages, and large corporations will probably want to opt for a dedicated server solution. However, cloud hosting remains a popular mid-point option.