Cloud hosting means hosting a website on a virtual server, which derives its computing resources from a network of physical servers. Cloud hosting gives its clients the freedom to tap into resources, depending on the requirement at a given time. The clients pay only for what they use and can avoid paying for additional capacity building, since they have the liberty to access it at any time.
Cloud Hosting has a definitive edge over traditional web hosting plans offered by Shared or Dedicated servers. The server meant for cloud hosting is no different from a physical server, but the functional aspects of a cloud sets it apart from the rest. Here, clients rent virtual server space rather than renting or purchasing physical servers. The charges paid are by the hour, depending on the requirement, at any given time.
Cloud Hosting sites operate across various interconnected web servers. Unlike Shared and Dedicated hosting sites, the data is sourced from different servers. For a client, it means buying resources from a cloud computing facility to host data, services or solutions.
Cloud Hosting provides remote or virtual services on a demand basis for hosting on top of a cloud computing infrastructure. Some of Cloud Hosting solutions are cloud servers, cloud desktops, cloud storage.
A cloud vendor provides composite solutions, virtual hardware, network and storage to multiple users at one go to help them host their own applications, services and data. The vendor uses virtualization to deliver the computing capacity of a data center to all the users. Thus many cloud servers can be created by virtualization of a physical server. A single cloud server may have the combined benefits of several physical servers. All the cloud servers share the same processor, memory, storage, network etc.
Flexibility of cloud hosting allows users to scale up resources as and when required.
Benefits
- Varnish Caching: With Cloud Hosting comes Varnish Caching, a facility that ensures proper operation and performance of a website while also speeding up information delivery.
- Freedom to choose an OS of your choice: Linux or Windows…It does not matter what operating system you choose.
- More benefit for less cost: Cloud Hosting gives you the advantages of a Dedicated Hosting, for a much lesser cost.
Cloud Vs Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated servers are placed in a data center that is secure and stable. You don’t have to pay for the infrastructure, but still enjoy complete command over the server. Effectively, it means that you can customize the performance of the server.
But dedicated server has a disadvantage: An accident can bring everything down and stop your operations abruptly. Secondly, as your requirements increase, so do your need for a bigger dedicated server. The obvious outcome is higher cost on rent.
An exceptional benefit of cloud hosting is ‘pay as per your use’. Its USP is the freedom it gives to modify your requirements. Cloud allows you to expand bandwidth and bring down downtime by adding more servers in the network.
How Does It Work?
Take Google for example. Every question you put on Google search runs on a massive network of computers (cloud) and not one particular server. Cloud gives Google the provision of adding more servers in the network to deal with additional load. If you cannot afford downtime and, at the same time, you want to scale up the operations, then cloud computing is the right solution for you.
Like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Youtube…all leverage the benefits of cloud computing.