Friday, March 4, 2011

The Benefits Of Cloud Software Over Traditional Shared Website Hosting

By Jean Bruller


Cloud hosting is the technology that is on every body's lips at the moment. Traditionally, websites have been hosted on standard dedicated servers. Today web hosts still use multiple dedicated servers for different websites. On each dedicated server, a shared hosting account is kept. Sometimes with shared hosting, your email, website and databases will be hosted on separate servers. When it comes down to it though, all your eggs are in one basket. The obvious downside of this is that if the dedicated server develops a fault, your website will be down. Cloud software is different. Cloud panels have strength in numbers.

Scalability is the brilliance of cloud hosting. It's very like mobile phones that offer a pay as you go tariff. If you use a small amount of resources, you only pay for those resources. If you are suddenly hit with loads of traffic, the cloud will let you expand instantly. Cloud hosts give you what you need, when you need it. Your website should never go offline because of an unexpected spike in traffic. You would simply be billed for the extra used. Thus, cloud hosting is cost effective. If you need the exclusivity of your own environment, then a cloud environment can offer this. No need to commit to an entire dedicated server anymore.

There is divided opinion on the reliability of cloud hosts. There are however, many arguments for. We looked at the scenario of standard shared hosting where if one single dedicated server fails, your website goes offline. Cloud hosting brings multiple nodes or servers together. Thus, you aren't effected if one node, or even a few go offline. Cloud hosting in this sense can be very reliable.

It is extremely quick to deploy and manage cloud hosting. Deploying the hardware is the first part of dedicated server hosting. Software and services then need to be configured. Not with cloud hosting. Cloud hosts simply insert new hardware, and it is brought into the cloud as a whole.

Cloud hosting is a very new technology. There are a few points dedicated servers have over cloud hosting. A cloud environment has scalability, reliability and cost to their advantage though. Any big host will have a cloud environment, or will be developing one. This says it all. Traditional hosting cannot keep up with a cloud environment. Cloud hosts are going to get more and more reliable as time goes on.




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