What is Cloud Hosting?
If you ever used Google, Amazon, Ebay or Facebook you’re already a cloud computing user. These websites and applications are operating under a massive computer infrastructure that people tap into from their local computers, popularly known as the “Cloud”. We use the same principals to power websites.
cloud hosting features
How Does Cloud Hosting Work?
A website hosted "in the cloud" is operating on multiple connected servers. Dedicated servers and traditional shared hosting limit websites to a single server. Instead, a website running on cloud hosting has access to the resources of multiple servers. Generally, your website files are hosted on one machine, email on another, and databases on yet another.
This type of load-balancing offers redundancy and reliability to handle all types of expansion. Cloud hosted websites can experience sudden traffic surges without crashing, and gradual growth with no server transfers and no downtime. Virtually, the processing power is unlimited as you can always add a new server and scale up.
Cloud Hosting is Ideal For...
- Sites/Blogs running WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke, etc.
- Sites running OSCommerce, ZenCart, ASP.NET Store Front
- Brochure and static HTML sites
- Marketing and promotional campaign sites
- Websites that use Windows, Linux or both
Choose Your Technology
Cloud hosting offers the power of many machines, giving your website ultimate flexibility. Choose between the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) or Windows .NET (ASP, SQL) framework... or both! Switch technologies anytime for no additional cost.
Cloud Hosting vs. Shared Hosting
The older and more common way to host websites is to load as many as will fit onto one server. Cloud hosting is different because your sites and applications are loaded across large pools of servers, and the traffic you receive is balanced out to entire fleets of servers.
It's the technology large, popular sites use to stay online because it solves two important problems. First, if a server fails, the other servers in the pool can continue to respond to requests for your site, and visitors often never notice a problem. Secondly, when your website gets suddenly popular, all the traffic being received can easily overwhelm a single server and ruin your moment in the spotlight. But our large server pools can handle billions of requests for millions of visitors each and every day.
The Pros and Cons
Scalability and cost efficiency are the most commonly known advantages of cloud hosting. It is less expensive than private or dedicated server solutions and boasts the same (if not more) power. As the technology is highly scalable, website expansion can be done with minimum limitations. Load balancing, redundant servers, managed hardware upgrades, and cloud hosted email are additional benefits.
For e-commerce or added security, SSL certificates may be added on at an additional charge. However, it is not possible to have a dedicated IP address or manage subdomains like private servers. With cloud hosting, each subdomain is treated as an individual website. Cloud hosting is capable of supporting unlimited databases and many popular content management systems (like Drupal and WordPress) but does not offer the full root access and control of a private server. Cloud hosting does have a web-based control panel for easy management of your account, email and databases.
