Has your website outgrown all the generic hosting services?
It calls for hosting that could handle the heavy web traffics and increased load of online transactions. Usually, businesses started hosting on a shared Linux server to experience and learn about web hosting. Once the website grew beyond its scope, they would upgrade to a cheap dedicated server. Dedicated hosting was the only option to handle the increased online activities of the website.
Cloud hosting has broken past this conventional practice. With the new cloud hosting model, businesses can build a website on a pre-integrated platform support that connects multiple servers on a high-speed network. They share resources like processing power, memory storage and the like to deliver hosting performance akin to dedicated hosting.
Although there still are some differences between the two, both cloud and dedicated hosting are the highest and most out-performing hosting services out there. Thus, it is an important decision for a company to choose between a cloud and a dedicated server hosting service.
What is Cloud Hosting?
The concept behind cloud hosting is simple. It involves hosting websites by uploading and scattering data over a network of several servers instead of on a single server. It is similar to using a “virtual machine” to upload, manage and broadcast data over the various servers in the cloud.
Yes, linking various servers together on one high-speed network and virtually optimizing them to act as a single server machine is the basis of cloud computing.
With cloud computing, you get access to the following- Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) plans. Out of which, IaaS plans include pay-as-you-go services that form the basis of best cloud hosting services.
The companies that provide IaaS services induct pay-as-you-go disk space, server networking and virtualization with their service packages. It gives users alternatives to static infrastructures to help them make better investment choices in cloud-based services than unnecessarily spending on expensive resources.
Advantages of Cloud Hosting
Scalability: The greatest and most retainable feature of cloud hosting is that it is highly scalable. You can freely assign more resources to your websites by scaling the consumption up and down with an intuitive site management dashboard. You can also view the overall statistics of your site resource requirement and draft predictions based on it. It helps users to take pre-emptive steps to improve and maintain the performance of the website.
Pay-per-Use: Users have to pay for the resources assigned to their website. It is way better than other subscription-based services as this feature introduces flexible billing for the hosting services that is the exclusive privilege of cloud hosting users.
As mentioned earlier, you can alter the resource consumption of your website by scaling the resources accordingly. If you can determine and adjust the resource consumption when the traffic is low, you can cut unnecessary costs.
Safety: The server machines forming the cloud environment are connected over a secure and private network. The cloud itself is like a server machine with a virtually isolated environment having its own resources, firewalls and other security protocols. Not only that, it is difficult for hackers to pinpoint the server machine to infect as one infected server machine would hardly affect the overall cloud as the infected server is cast out.
Best Uptime: The cloud servers are connected to each other on a high-speed network that surpasses any other modern networking system. It is possible to achieve near 100% uptime with cloud hosting services.
Always Available: As cloud hosting operates on multiple servers and not a single machine, problems like hardware damage, server downtime and such do not pose a problem for overall performance. It is simple if one server is not performing optimally, other servers in the network share the load.
What is Dedicated Server Hosting?
Hosting providers lease an entire server machine to a business for hosting their website/s. It is customized and configured to the specific needs of the business by the hosting provider. The leased servers are essentially for the sole use of the company as it sees fit.
Having a server of their own dedicated to host the sole website/s of their business alone is what makes up for the name dedicated hosting service.
The concept is simple, instead of configuring the server and allocating hosting on a part of it, the provider gives the entire server machine. Needless to say, it provides the best possible processing, disk space and other resources.
Dedicated server hosting is the most powerful, best performing and top-of-the-line service that any provider could possibly offer.
Advantages of Dedicated Servers
Full Control: Users get total administrative control over the dedicated server that allows them, to fully manage and control the hosting. In other hosting services, users have little or no control over the server since they share it with others. However, dedicated hosting is not a subservient service.
Ultimate Resources: A single server machine can host multiple websites at a time. How? Because it boasts of massive processing power, disk storage capacity and has neigh unlimited data transfer rate. With dedicated hosting, users get full access to all the superior specs of a server machine, all for themselves.
Best Functionality: Users get the ultimate performance from a dedicated server for whatever website or web application they upload on it. A server can handle humongous amounts of data, web traffic and software load.
Fully Customizable: Customization is the most vital advantage of dedicated servers. Web developers and programmers require basic hardware of the dedicated server to create custom web server environments for web applications. Different online applications have their own specific runtime requirements like installing alternative operating systems, developer extensions, etc.
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Choosing the Right Hosting Between Dedicated and Cloud
Cloud hosting is a “pay as you go” approach or flexible billing structure that is cost-efficient.
You can also scale the resources up and down to tackle busy hours as also lazy hours for your website.
It boasts of near 100% uptime and full availability.
It is flexible enough to handle eCommerce websites of big and small companies without deterring performance.
Dedicated servers are the most conventional hosting service for big eCommerce companies. However, it is no more limited to them.
Nowadays, many online gaming applications and other such websites utilize dedicated hosting given its unparalleled performance and hardware.
Bottom Line
If you are looking to host an eCommerce website and have huge engagement but not enough funds, opt for cloud hosting.
If you are a huge company that runs high-end web applications with a massive following, I suggest you go with dedicated hosting.
