Cloud hosting is hosting a service, commonly a website, on multiple distributed servers. Like a server farm, this provides greater performance (through load balancing) and availability than using a single server, but the distributed nature of the cloud means requests can be serviced closer to the client and makes it more tolerant of network failures.
Benefits of cloud hosting
Cloud hosting benefits the users from various angles. Scalability and cost efficiency are the commonly known advantages.
As the technology is highly scalable (load balancing, hardware upgrades, etc), website expansion can be done with minimum limitations. Think about the hassle of migrating your website from a shared server to a dedicated server; think about server crash when your website experienced a sudden surge – all these problem can be avoided easily by switching to cloud hosting.
Cost is another huge plus if you need a lot of processing power. Cloud hosting companies charge their users based on the quantity of computing power consumed. It’s like your electricity and water supply bills – it’s pay-per-use thus gone are the days where you need to reserve massive server powers to avoid website crash from sudden traffic surge.
Major disadvantage with cloud hosting: Security
Questions like these arise when it comes to cloud hosting:
- I am sharing the same physical hardware with other users, is my data safe?
- Where is my data located at? (You no longer control the physical location of your data in cloud hosting)
The security issue is always one of the major questions and arguments raised when it comes to cloud hosting.
Compiled and edited from WebHostingSecretsRevealed.com
