What is a cloud hosting? This question may the last one you need to understand if you are not confident to decide which hosting service to take for your business.
The same problem with dedicated hosting, virtual private server (VPS) and shared hosting services is that the three types of web hosting are actually unable to keep their servers online when resource usage exceeds normal limits.
Usually caused by an increase number of visitors.
Server is a device with limitations.
How much memory can be used, how much data storage, how many requests can be handled.
You may not worry until it actually happens to your website that is hosted on a shared hosting service, VPS or dedicated hosting.
In reality, this rarely happens.
Most websites never exceed the normal limit of resource usage, except on shared hosting because they have limited resources. Remember, in shared hosting, everything is sharing resources.
But there are some websites that regularly get tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, and millions of visitors every day.
Then what is the solution to deal with this?
Because of the reality as stated above, the web hosting company offers a service called cloud hosting.
What is a cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting is a hosting service that was created with the aim of ensuring a website stays online despite the explosion of visitors as described above.
Cloud hosting offers unlimited capabilities to handle very high visitor explosions.
How does it work?
On a shared hosting services, virtual private server or dedicated servers. Your website only has one server.
In a cloud hosting, your website will be associated with many servers.
Normally if a server is down/offline, the website on that server will also be down (because it only has one server).
But with cloud hosting, the website that is down will be moved to another server that is online (because it is associated with many servers).
This means, with cloud hosting, your website will experience less downtime.
Although in fact, from the experiences of cloud hosting users, downtime can happen as well.
It is not a 100% guarantee that the website will always stay online. Even if you use cloud hosting with the best infrastructure in the world, such as Google Cloud and AWS.
Disadvantages of Cloud Hosting
The cost for cloud hosting is generally more expensive than unmanaged VPS and can be more expensive than dedicated hosting if you choose a large resource.
Apart from that, you will need technical knowledge to manage the server if you choose unmanaged cloud hosting.
Is a Cloud Hosting Good for Your Business?
Cloud hosting is suitable for websites that regularly get tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands to millions of visitors every day.
Cloud hosting also suitable for websites that get a high number of visitors but cannot be predicted when they will come.
Whether it’s because of a post that suddenly went viral or suddenly crowded at certain times such as university websites during the new school year.
Notes About Cloud Hosting
Actually, when viewed from the understanding and how it works, cloud hosting is not included in one of the types of hosting, because cloud hosting is more precisely aimed at the technology.
For example, nowadays many hosting providers incorporate cloud hosting technology into shared and VPS hosting types, so they are called Shared Hosting on the Cloud and VPS Cloud Hosting.
Some providers offer Shared Hosting on the Cloud at prices that are only slightly more expensive or even not much different from those still using traditional shared hosting.
Although some of them only mention their hosting package as Cloud Hosting, they don’t mention that the proper name is shared hosting on the cloud.
The performance of shared hosting that already uses cloud hosting is not necessarily better than that which is still using traditional shared hosting.
