Definition:
Cloud Hosting is preferred by all the corporate giants, but if you’re new to the hosting arena, the first and foremost question popping up in your mind would definitely be – “what is cloud hosting”.
Cloud hosting sites basically operate across various web servers that are interconnected, and as opposed to traditional hosting forms such as shared hosting, and dedicated hosting, data is rendered from various servers.
Benefits of Cloud Hosting
You pay for what you use: As your business needs fluctuate, you’ve nothing to worry as you can change your hosting packages based upon your needs, and pay only for what you use.
Choice of OS:
You can choose operating system of your choice – i.e. Linux or Windows.
Flexibility:
Complete server configuration controls via an API or web-based interface.
Get the Best of Both Worlds:
You can enjoy the benefits of dedicated hosting, but don’t need to bear the heavy cost of dedicated hosting, if you don’t have extensive requirements.
Cloud Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated servers are always located in a secure and stable data center saving you from infrastructural investments. You’ve complete control over the server, and hence you can customize the performance levels of the server completely.
However, in case of any mishaps, then complete set-up goes for a toss. Secondly, if your requirements grow, you need to rent/lease a bigger dedicated server, and bear higher cost.
In case of cloud hosting, you pay as you use, and you can always make changes to your requirements (which is the real beauty of cloud hosting concept!).
Additionally, you can add up other servers in the network to tackle downtime, or to expand your existing bandwidth/storage space without affecting the existing set-up even for a moment.
So, it’s pretty clear that one should give a serious thought to shifting to cloud hosting rather than spending unnecessarily on a
VPS/dedicated host
unless their business really demands it.
Also Known As: cloud web hosting, cloud site hosting
Common Misspellings: clowd hosting, claud hosting
Examples:
Alright, we’re done with this theoretical stuff, and definition of cloud hosting, and now you ask – show me an example of cloud hosting. Well whether you know it or not, but you’re pretty familiar with this one – yes, we’re talking about Google!
Last year, Google rolled out the Caffeine Update as a part of which, they made lot of infrastructural changes, and moved to a cloud dominated hosting base.
How Does It Work?
Continuing our example of Google, whenever you perform a search, the queries run on a massive network of computers (cloud), and instead of being limited to a single server, Google has nothing to worry about the load.
This gives complete flexibility of adding more systems (servers) in the network in order to cope up with the additional load (whether expected or unexpected). Therefore, one can scale up the operations manifolds without really facing any downtime.