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By Garenarnold
August 30, 2011
Cloud hosting is getting a lot of buzz nowadays and a lot of popular businesses are taking advantage of cloud hosting. The reason being is cloud hosting can handle spikes in web traffic in a small amount of time very efficiently and is the most scalable hosting option offered on the market today. Furthermore, the billing system used for cloud hosting is much different and cloud architecture is vastly different, as well.
The benefits of cloud hosting
To understand how cloud hosting works let’s look at how a traditional hosting plan works (shared, VPS, and dedicated). With all three of these plans you will be hosting your website on a single server, which will be retrieved and displayed on your visitors screen. Bear in mind you typically have another backup server in case your server goes down. With cloud on the other hand, the architecture is quite different. Your data is stored on multiple servers which are all connected; this is described as a grid. What this complex grid does is amplifies the power of your loading times and connection speeds.
With cloud hosting your network servers are not located in the same data center, and could be located anywhere around the world. This increases the redundancy and workload over various servers which evenly distribute that workload over multiple servers located within the cloud. In turn, if one server crashed within the cloud structure it would not affect your site’s performance in anyway.
Along with the architectural differences that are clearly different, the billing system to pay for cloud hosting is much different. To put this in perspective, picture that you run an Internet Marketing business and your income is based on how many affiliate sales, Google AdSense clicks you get, or other income revenues that are generated throughout your website. Let’s say you have a great month and get 200,000,000 unique visitors. Your web statistics or analytics would show you had an increased rate of visitors for that month. With cloud hosting you would pay as you go for the amount of resources you used for that month. Obviously you used a fair amount of resources as your earnings were higher as opposed to you getting far less traffic and only getting 50,000,000 unique visitors the previous month.
Drawbacks of cloud hosting
With all the positive things about cloud hosting there are a couple of drawbacks or disadvantages to using cloud hosting. For instance, one huge drawback that draws people away from shared hosting can potentially be a threat to cloud hosting. Security can be compromised as you’re sharing servers on a cloud with other websites, which if labeled Blackhat, malware, etc. could harm your website. Additionally, you do not have any control over which server your data will reside on.
FAQ’s on cloud hosting
Since cloud hosting is new to a lot of webmasters or even server administrators there are a number of questions people commonly have about either migrating to cloud hosting or starting a cloud service. Below are some FAQ’s that are commonly asked about cloud hosting:
What operating system can I use?
Cloud hosting comes with various options, as you can run either Windows or Linux. Just like dedicated and VPS you can elect to use managed or unmanaged, where you have complete root access to your server. You have the ability to install any control panel you would like on your cloud. With cloud you can completely reboot your system at any time with a soft reset or a hard (power cycle) reboot.
Can I get site backups?
Webmasters are concerned with the security of backing up your cloud. Just like the traditional means of hosting you can create an automatic or scheduled backup of your data. Furthermore, many cloud services allow you to compress your backup files for a monthly fee.
Do I still get customer service support?
As many newbies don’t have a lot or any experience with cloud hosting you will be allowed to contact customer service reps via telephone or support ticket. In terms of getting help with applications or control panel setup, this can vary from each cloud hosting plan. “Managed” would be able to assist you in troubleshooting and installation, but “unmanaged” would not be able to assist you.
Is billing affected when turning off my server?
As stated above you will be billed for the amount of resources you use. Turning off your server will not exempt you from being billed per hour as you are paying for the dedicated amount of RAM and space that is allocated to you. However, deleting your server from the control panel would insure that you will no longer be billed.
All and all cloud hosting is revolutionizing the way hosting companies do business. Cloud hosting is a great option if you are looking to scale your hosting plan as your web presence grows. This is by far the most dynamic way to purchase hosting. You will be paying for the peace of mind and you can trust that your website will be up 100% of the time.
What is your opinion on cloud hosting? Share your views in 500 words or more at your cloud hosting review. We’ll publish your comments on our gls55 holdings blog and toss you FREE t-shirt for your efforts! (while quantities last, exclusive of S&H)
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