We are in an internet age, and every business needs a website to increase their customer reach and brand awareness.
To have a website, you need hosting. And the hosting option you choose can make or break your online presence. But before we learn why cloud hosting is better than other forms of web hosting, we need to get the basics out of the way.
What is web hosting?
Web hosting means providing server space, web services, and file maintenance services to individuals or businesses that don’t own their own web servers. There are two forms of hosting.
- Traditional hosting. The website owner buys a fixed amount of space and web resources and can only use the amount of resources that they’ve paid for. There are two types. Shared hosting is when multiple websites are hosted on the same server while dedicated hosting is where one website is hosted on one server.
- Cloud hosting. Cloud hosting is the most recent form of hosting. It takes advantage of cloud computing technologies that create a virtual hosting space with unlimited resources that are faster, more reliable and more scalable than physical hosting servers.
Based on these definitions, cloud hosting seems to be more endowed to support business websites. But that’s not enough; you need to know why cloud hosting is more advantageous over traditional forms of hosting so that you decide whether it’s the right web hosting solution for your business website.
Here are five advantages of cloud hosting that you should know.
1. 100 % uptime
According to a recent report on application performance monitoring, the average hourly cost of infrastructure failure is $100,000 per hour. Not all businesses lose this much per hour when disaster strikes, but website downtown will cause guaranteed losses for your business.
When your website is hosted on physical servers, which is the case with traditional hosting, your hosting provider cannot guarantee a 100% website uptime. You have to experience downtimes due to scheduled maintenance or damages to their servers.
Downtimes create a bad customer experience for your customers, and you may start losing customers due to daily or weekly downtimes. Web hosting on cloud servers guarantees that you’re always online and can never lose customers or incur losses due to website downtime.
2. Cloud hosting is cost effective
When using dedicated or shared hosting, your resource allocation is rigid.
Your hosting provider packages their offers in specific bundles that cannot be changed. This means that when you’re starting your website, you spend too much on resources that you’ll never fully utilize. For example, when the minimum offer is 100GB of data storage, and you’re only using 5GB, most of the resources you paid for are remaining unutilized.
In the same way, when your website experiences a spike in traffic that is more than your allocation size, you overwork your server, and the website goes down. Website downtime leads to massive losses.
Cloud hosting, on the other hand, is different. Your cloud hosting provider can ramp up your online resources on the go as your online presence grows. This means that your hosting allocations increase without the need for downtime or server reboots.
In addition, most cloud hosting solutions now offer pay-as-you-use services. This model allows your site to dynamically use more resources than you initially bargained for, and then you pay extra for only what your website uses. You don’t have to buy a bigger package for traffic and bandwidth usage spikes.
3. Performance
Every website owner wants the best performance when it comes to web hosting.
However, traditional hosting solutions don’t offer the best performance. Even with the latest SSD servers, the resources on shared or dedicated hosting cannot compete with the high-performance output of cloud hosting.
Hosting your website on cloud hosting guarantees an ultrafast and auto-scalable platform. Cloud hosting can handle any website needs and is the best solution for high traffic websites.
When you’re looking for optimal website performance, cloud hosting is the best way to go.
4. Flexibility and scalability
As a growing business, you need a hosting solution that adapts to your growth.
Cloud-based services are ideal for growing businesses or bandwidth demands that are constantly fluctuating.
When you buy hosting services the traditional way, your resources are limited. You cannot exceed them without overloading the servers. However, cloud hosting is instantly scalable.
When your website experiences a spike in traffic or bandwidth usage, the cloud computing architecture increases its capacity automatically to allow your website to accommodate more visitors without any downtime.
5. Seamless disaster recovery
Data loss can lead to massive loses for any business.
When you host your website on traditional hosting, data backups are either copied to a disk or to off-site physical servers. When disaster strikes and your server gets damage, it takes lots of hours to recover the data and get you back online.
In addition, data backups are not done frequently which means that you may lose a lot of data if your scheduled backup hadn’t taken place.
With cloud hosting, everything is different. Instead of physical backups, cloud hosting backs up your data by mirroring your site on a cloud environment or by a recovery cloud. Backing up your data happens frequently, and can be done multiple times a day depending on your hosting provider.
The upside of cloud backups is that they ensure seamless data recovery, with minimal downtime (if any,) and little data loss.
Conclusion
Cloud computing is the new frontier in business computing and the delivery of software and applications.
With the reliable, cost-effective, secure and scalable hosting features it offers, there is a reason why many business owners are migrating their websites from traditional hosting solutions to cloud hosting.
Don’t be left behind. Don’t let website downtime, low-performance and the risk of data loss that comes with traditional infrastructure lead your business into losses. Switch to cloud hosting today, and you’ll experience all the benefits that come with an ultra-fast, high-performance service that is cost effective.
About The Author
Irene Fatyanova is a content writer who loves reporting on the latest web design, online marketing trends, and eCommerce solutions. She is working with TechnicalMindsWeb.com. She is also a regular contributor on LifeHack.org. DZone.com, and TweakYourBiz.com.
