What is Cloud Hosting?

What is Cloud Hosting?

Simply stated, Cloud hosting is a server and network infrastructure that uses software to divide a single physical server into multiple virtual servers. Often, these devices are referred to as virtual machines, or VMs.

Public cloud vs Private cloud

When your hosting account was using a single server, you had the choice of either sharing the machine you used with other accounts – a shared server, or running an individual machine specifically for your site – dedicated server.

With cloud hosting you have a similar choice to make.

You can either have a public cloud – the equivalent of a shared server – where the collection of networked machines hold the data for several sites. The hardware is shared between a number of other virtualized accounts, and so the cost of the resource is shared. Unlike traditional shared hosting however the virtual server’s resources are ring fenced. You do not share disk space, processing power, or anything else with any other account. You simply share the racks in the data centers.

In effect you get all the benefits of shared hosting, with none of the downsides.

Or if public cloud is not what you are looking for it is possible to create a private cloud set-up that does not share its infrastructure with any other accounts or sites.  This obviously comes with a higher cost, but offers greater security and control.

Server resources are ringfenced within private clouds meaning that there is no possibility of having to share hardware, and the entire virtualized resource sits behind your own firewall.

The upsides to this are fairly clear to anyone who has ever considered data security important.  But it does limit your ability to access some of the more innovative cloud services. 

Cloud vs Single server

So why has the hosting world moved away from dedicated server hosting to cloud technology? It is clearly a more complex and therefore more expensive system to set up, so there must be some major benefits right?

Well yes, now you come to mention it there are some pretty fabulous benefits to using cloud technology instead of a traditional dedicated server:

Benefit	Description
Reliability	If your website exists only on one machine in a data center somewhere, and that machine goes offline then your site vanishes.  If your site is shared between an array of interconnected machines that are all storing the same information and one of them goes offline then the slack is picked up by the others and the site remains online. If you have any doubts about how much of impact downtime can have on your site – and by default your business then consider that Amazon’s own server’s caused their site to be offline for 13 minutes on Prime Day in 2018, and this is said to have cost them almost $100,000,000 in sales. That is over $120,000 every second.
Scalability	Because of the underlying infrastructure of your cloud hosting set-up there will be far more in the way of system resources than you ever need to use.  Even once these have been shared between all the different accounts on your public cloud set up there will be a vast amount of processing power sitting in reserve for this very purpose. These resources can be scaled easily, whether it is a quick phone call to your hosting company when you know you are expecting extra traffic, through to setting up the hosting architecture to automatically increase in resources based on real time requirements, days like Cyber Monday should not be a concern. Unlike on dedicated server set-ups where sudden increases in visitors can lead to the whole site going down, with cloud hosting your account can be responsive to demand, and you only pay for what you use.
Versatility	Cloud hosting is also incredibly versatile.  More so now than ever before hosting can be individualized to the specific needs of the customer – you.  You don’t have to pick a package from a list, none of which quite fit your requirements.  You can have exactly the space, architecture, processing power, OS, and security you need with a cloud set-up. Perhaps your site uses a relatively small front end but accesses a massive database.  Perhaps you need to host large files for download from an otherwise small site.  Whatever your individual needs they can be accommodated perfectly on the cloud. As if you need any more reasons to get on board the cloud server bandwagon then you should also bear in mind that should you choose to manage your own server you can do so from your smartphone.  Most cloud server hosting accounts can be managed directly from your mobile instead of having to gain access to the actual data center itself.