subject: The Benefits Of Cloud Hosting [print this page] Cloud hosting is a form of web hosting that is growing in popularity. This is largely due to its many benefits that include the potential to save on costs, scalability, and less chance of downtime.
Cost Savings
An important benefit of cloud hosting is that it can save on costs. With cloud hosting you pay for hosting resource, such as bandwidth, as you use it. When traffic increases extra resource is available to your website and this will automatically be deployed, but you dont pay for it when you are not using it. With other forms of hosting you hire servers based on the amount of traffic you expect. This means having to hire enough servers to cope with expected traffic which potentially means paying for more than is necessary. This is not a worry with Cloud Hosting. It is almost like paying for hosting depending on the amount of traffic to the website. When traffic is high you pay more for your hosting as more resource is required, but when traffic is slow the hosting costs are lower.
Scalability
Cloud hosting can be advantageous to growing businesses. As a business expands the popularity of their website typically does too, and more traffic leads to more bandwidth being required. This can lead to problems in term of hosting with more servers costing more money. If a website increases in popularity too rapidly it can make it hard for the hosting to keep up with it. Acquiring more servers cannot always be done instantly meaning that in the short term a website, and therefore a business, can suffer. These potential issues can be mitigated with cloud hosting. Hosting resource can be easily adapted to meet a websites needs, meaning bandwidth can be easily increased to meet demand.
Less Chance of Downtime
By opting for cloud hosting website owners can limit the possibility of downtime. Downtime can be a particular problem when experiencing spikes in traffic due to a lack of resource to cope with this. As resource can more easily keep up with traffic, cloud hosting is less susceptible to downtime. There is also the issue of physical servers versus cloud servers. If a website is hosted on a single physical server and there is a problem with this server then it can cause website downtime. This doesnt have to be the case with cloud hosting as the load is spread across a number of servers. If one server fails then another can take the load meaning a website is unaffected.
Backup and Data Storage
With cloud hosting there is less chance of losing data. If this is stored on a physical server and the server blows up or there is a fire in the building where it is stored then this data will be lost. As being stored in the cloud means there is no single physical server it means this risk doesnt exist. This is no single point of failure that can result in the loss of data.
No Need to Update Hardware
If a website is hosted on dedicated servers then these might need constantly updating. This is not the case with cloud hosting as there are no physical servers to update. To an extent this makes cloud hosting future proof as you can respond more easily as technology advances.
Which Types of Websites can Benefit?
Growing businesses can benefit from cloud hosting. As traffic increases it is simpler, and potentially cheaper, to increase their bandwidth than if using physical servers. Resource is readily available when required without there being the need to pay for servers that might not be needed. Websites with fluctuating traffic can also find cloud hosting advantageous. This includes seasonal websites, for examples Christmas related sites or holiday company sites that might be particularly popular leading up to the summer period. These websites can benefit from having extra resource available at busy times without having to pay for it all year round.
