In the past few years, there has been a lot of talk about Cloud Hosting in the web design and hosting community. If you’ve ever researched hosting choices on the internet, there’s a good chance you will have come across several cloud hosting options. This solution has gained a lot of traction in the hosting sphere, with many hosting providers offering a range of packages. Despite such popularity, not many people understand what Cloud Hosting entails and the benefits it offers to businesses. By the way Intellipaat is offering DevOps certification and AWS certification training. You might want to check it out.
What is Cloud Hosting?
For those who don’t know, Cloud Hosting is a system where the combined resources of several clustered servers are used to provide hosting capabilities. This system is ideal for websites that have outgrown the resources of their existing regular hosting platform. For example, if you run a website that has become extremely popular, attracting heavy traffic every day, a regular shared hosting environment will not be able to accommodate its load. When this happens, you’ll need to explore other hosting alternatives. You can get an idea of what a host does from their URL. For instance, a https://www.umbrellar.com/cloud-platforms/umbrellarcloud/ tells you that the web hosting service provider uses a secure cloud and your data is safe.
Not long back, it was convenient for website owners in this situation to opt for a dedicated server or a VPS. While this would solve the problem of load sharing and resource management, it does require some level of IT proficiency and a touch more money. Cloud Hosting provides the features of a dedicated server and a few extra options, without most of the challenges associated with it. Also, it is less expensive. The load on your server is balanced, while you’ll have all the resources you need. Furthermore, security is taken care of and your website can be accessed by anyone, regardless of where they are visiting from.
Why move to The Cloud?
Cloud Hosting services are very much in demand these days. Consequently, many web hosting providers are rushing to keep up with the demand. This has brought about several cloud hosting platforms.
So, why should you consider moving your website to The Cloud?
Uptime advantage: Every website provider promises to guarantee at least 99.9% uptime. However, the truth is that in most cases, they cannot meet this promise. You might only find out about this after receiving an email from a visitor or if you created a website uptime alert that tells you whenever your website goes down. It’s hard to constantly maintain 99% uptime when multiple websites are hosted across a single server and sharing one resource. The moment a neighbouring website experiences a surge in traffic, resources will shifted to accommodate the increase, which can in turn cause other websites on the server to experience downtime.
Additionally, it takes only one website to be compromised for all sites on that server to be affected. This is why websites on shared servers are more susceptible to DDoS attacks and intrusions. Attacks like these can cause whole servers to go offline for a period. This means all the websites on the server will be offline simultaneously. However, with Cloud Hosting, individual websites are hosted on their own servers, so the activity on another site will not affect its uptime. Even in the case of shared resources, a website will simply be moved to another server if a problem occurs, drastically reducing the amount of time it would be offline.
Scalability: Another advantage of Cloud Hosting over regular hosting is the ability to scale. In our example above, a website suddenly becomes extremely popular and begins to attract a good deal of traffic; this means the site will need more resources. If you’re using a normal hosting platform, you will first need to buy a bigger space before starting the migration process. With Cloud Hosting on the other hand, more resources will simply be allocated to your website.
This is what scalability entails; it is the ability to add or reduce resources whenever needed. This will also help businesses save money. For instance, if you run an ecommerce business online, you may experience a surge in seasonal traffic – especially on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. With Cloud Hosting, you can easily have more resources allocated to your site to accommodate the increase in traffic, after which you can go back to your original settings. This is more cost effective than paying for a larger package from the onset or losing customers because your server can’t carry the increase in load.
Improved security: Cloud Hosting makes it difficult for your website to be compromised and used for illegal purposes. As pointed out earlier, when you’re on a shared hosting platform, it’s easier to be a victim of DDoS attacks, hacking and malware intrusion. This is because if just one website on that server is compromised, the probability of all the others falling victim to the same fate is high. It’s also not easy for hackers to access to your website if it’s hosted on a cloud server, because in most cases, your site will be moved from server to server in a bid to provide an efficient service. This means that a hacker will not be able to lock on to your site for any length of time in order to carry out any illegal activity.
SEO advantage: Not too long ago, you needed to host your website in the region where the bulk of your target audience was based. Also, having a country related domain name helped search engines determine whether your business was predominantly aimed at the local market. This helped in improving visibility for local search. For instance, if you had a consultancy agency in London, hosting in the UK and using a .CO.UK domain name would help you rank high for local search. While this system is still very much in use, you don’t need to go through the whole process with Cloud Hosting.
Websites are not tied to a particular country or region. Of course, you can still decide to use a ccTLD, but you’ll still enjoy the SEO advantages associated with hosting locally.
Final words
Switching from a regular host to Cloud Hosting may initially appear a hassle. However, if you consider that your competitors are probably on The Cloud, you will realise that you stand to gain a lot more than just the bonuses afforded by Cloud Hosting. You’ll also be putting your business on a level playing field with the competition.
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