In the recent past, cloud hosting plans have become very popular amongst businesses, big and small. The reason being that cloud hosting follows the concept of “divide and rule” where resources for running any website come from multiple servers which are interconnected through an underlying network. The advantage of such a platform is that resources are always available when you need them and you will have to pay only for resources which you use and nothing extra. Chances of downtimes are also negligible because even if one server crashes, there are many servers on standby which will take over the workload of that server.
 
A bigger advantage of cloud hosting is the fact that it is especially useful for handling occasional traffic peaks when workloads are very high. You will not have to face bandwidth issues in handling these heavy workloads because you can always get the extra resources from other servers. In short, your site will depend on a group or cluster of servers. These work and collaborate together and are collectively known as a cloud. The best example of cloud hosting can be seen in the Google where this search engine relies on multiple servers spread across the world for information to deliver to its end-users.

In the cloud, every server will carry out specific tasks and if any one fails or malfunctions, there is another server which takes over its workload. But, if the server hardware is of inferior quality, it can have an impact of the server’s performance. So, you should be wary of cheap cloud vendors which are known to provide low-quality hardware.

This focus on quality is of utmost importance when you are expecting enterprise-level hosting solutions. This is why the enterprise grade cloud vendors will only offer very reliable hardware which is superior to that provided by dedicated hosting service providers.

How cloud hosting is different from other types of traditional hosting:

If you compare cloud servers with dedicated servers you will see that the cloud is far more reliable simply because you can get resources from multiple servers in a network and not only a single server, as in dedicated hosting. So, even if there is an emergency, your resources will be accessible as you are not dependent on a single server. There is no single point of failure in the cloud as opposed to traditional hosting solutions.

In terms of costs, cloud solutions are considered to be cost-effective because you only pay for resources that you use. However, when your usage is very high, the costs of using cloud computing services are likely to be steep. In case of shared servers or VPS servers, the cost factor is much lower, but, at the same time, reliability is less too. In VPS hosting, a single server is partitioned to create many servers. So, various users will be using a single physical server divided into many virtual servers and therefore, capital costs are very low. This solution is perfect for businesses which do not really need the high reliability which cloud hosting offers.

This discussion shows how cloud hosting is distinct from shared hosting, dedicated hosting and even VPS hosting. Cloud hosting has indeed come a very long way. Many big companies have adopted it for many years now and this is why cloud service providers are now offering clients competitive prices for these plans. With more and more companies shifting to the cloud, the costs of cloud computing will come down further.

Now, medium-sized businesses are looking at the cloud as a very lucrative alternative to traditional hosting solutions. Smaller businesses have been late in embracing the cloud mainly because of the high costs associated with these solutions. But, on the whole, cloud migration is the best possible option for these companies because they can save a lot of money on capital and operational costs. With the cloud, they will not have to buy costly hardware for data storage. Neither will they have to hire qualified staff to run the servers. With more and more cost-friendly cloud deployments making their entry it can be expected that more and more enterprises will also make the move to the cloud.

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