What is Cloud Hosting?
You may have heard about it before but without really understanding what it is. Cloud hosting is a hot thing right now, so you are probably wondering if it can help you and your online business. The “cloud” is a new IT definition ignored most of the time by the general public. Confusing and somehow cryptic, cloud hosting is basically a technology that facilitates access to powerful computers and servers from across the world without any extended IT knowledge.
The big names use it
Today’s most known online companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook use cloud technology. Whenever you read your e-mail, work with Google docs, or just relax on Facebook, you are using a cloud based service. Once only available for large companies, cloud hosting is becoming more viable small business, both in terms of affordability and reliability.
A new technology
Cloud web hosting defines a service that provides hosting to customers using a huge number of physical networks and servers. Similar with the power lines that facilitate access to energy without any restriction, a cloud web hosting enables the customer to use as much as needed from the huge cloud network without having to install and run any additional servers and systems.
The difference
Usually web hosting uses single servers for each hosting plan. If the customer wants more computing power or storage they must pay for additional servers, even though they will only need it for a small period of time. Additional, a customer may need less hosting power than it is offered and they must pay for the full server even if using just a fraction of it.
A cloud hosting service can deliver almost unlimited hosting power, either as CPU, bandwidth or hosting space. All this power is scalable, meaning that it can be increased or decreased to suit your online business needs.
Important advantages
Imagine that you know for a fact that during the holiday season your online business will need a lot of bandwidth to accommodate the huge number of customers that will want to purchase your products. With cloud hosting you can increase the bandwidth and the hosting CPU during that period without changing the hosting plan for the entire year. This way you will not lose customers and still pay a great price for your web hosting.
Another great feature of cloud web hosting is its reliability. Most often on traditional hosting services one or more servers overload and shut down during peak hours or because of malicious denial-of-service attacks. When this happens all the websites hosted on those servers will go down as well. Even if the hosting service solves the problem and restarts the servers, those online businesses lose valuable customers during offline times.
A cloud hosting service can shut down one or more servers from the cloud without affecting the entire cloud. The other servers will take over the load and the entire system will function without a glitch providing constant hosting to all its customers.
This reliability together with scalability makes cloud web hosting service invaluable for any competitive online business that aims to get the edge over its online competitors.