Website hosting is the most underrated element of a website. It’s not visible to the naked eye, so uneducated customers simply don’t want to invest money in it. By far, it’s easier to convince customers to pay for a theme than for superior hosting. However, hosting is responsible for speed, performance, and security. Cloud hosting, the new kid on the block in terms of hosting options, comes with superior features. Some say that it’s a real game-changer.
You’re in the right place if you want to dive deeper into this alternative. Sooner or later, you will switch to cloud hosting. You will be better off as an early adopter rather than waiting for your competitors to jump the bandwagon.
Check out this article to understand why cloud hosting is the future, its advantages and disadvantages, and how it can generate more revenue for your business.
Website Hosting – Traditional vs. Cloud
Traditional hosting implies keeping the files of your site on a server. Anytime users want to visit your site, their browsers send requests to the server. The biggest problem is the server: if it’s down, your website is down; if it underperforms, the site loads slowly. Take into account that the server may host hundreds of other sites – it’s about the shared plans. In the worst cases, the server may get 100% corrupted and you lose your site files. Of course, a serious hosting platform creates site backups periodically. That’s so important with selecting a reliable hosting partner. Still, it’s possible that the backup does not include your site’s latest updates, so you could lose precious time spent on site improvement.
Cloud hosting goes the extra mile and almost eliminates all the problems of traditional hosting. The site’s files are kept in the cloud – a network of servers that stores multiple copies of your site. Tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft invest huge amounts of money in reliable cloud networks. Moreover, other serious companies created their own cloud networks and offer hosting services for everyone. Even big names in traditional hosting shift step by step to this new technology.
Advantages of Cloud Hosting
Big companies, hosting businesses, and investors wouldn’t have spent so much money on cloud computing and hosting without solid evidence that the cloud is the future. The strategic advantages of cloud hosting make webmasters consider switching to this type of host. The following benefits should convince you about the potential of cloud hosting.
Improved Performance
Nowadays, every millisecond delay represents huge amounts of money for online giants like Amazon or Alibaba. Your customers don’t like waiting for your website to load. Site speed is a Google ranking factor and impacts user experience. Webmasters spend a lot of time and resources to improve site performance. One of the most effective solutions to considerably improve site performance is top-class hosting for your site. The server performance is a decisive factor for the speed of the sites hosted.
Cloud hosting helps webmasters create and maintain blazingly fast sites. Thanks to the technologies used, cloud hosting leverages the power of cloud computing. Besides powerful computing capabilities, it serves the site visitors from the closest data center. It means less time spent by the browser requesting the site files.
Scalability
Scalability is another major benefit of cloud hosting, and it helps everyone involved in e-commerce activities. Traditional hosting requires you to pay for a predefined plan that allows limited traffic spikes. Businesses evolve, and, as a webmaster, you can’t have full control over the traffic generated by a website. A post may go viral and generate a lot of traffic, or some offers on your site may attract way more visitors than you planned. Besides, events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are traffic spikes for most businesses. Upgrading to a superior plan only for these events isn’t feasible.
Cloud hosting resolves this issue; just a few clicks are enough to grow the site storage, RAM, and bandwidth. It offers an unparalleled set of options to scale up or down the site resources. You pay only for the computing power needed by your site – nothing more or less.
Flexibility
Cloud hosting eliminates the stress of predetermined plans and limited possibilities of hosting platforms. Paradoxically, the high degree of flexibility may cause trouble for webmasters – it’s hard to identify the proper configuration while you have so many options just a click away. Things like storage expansion, increased computing power, and upgrades/downgrades of the versions of the coding languages are achieved with a single click.
For example, you have at least three options to deploy a WordPress-powered website on Google Cloud. Compute Engine, a system that provides a virtual machine for your website, is a great fit for small and medium websites. App Engine provides WordPress webmasters with more flexibility to manage traffic spikes. Google Kubernetes Engine is more complex and comes with a large set of features for managing complex sites. In this case, you need solid knowledge of the Google Cloud Platform.
Enhanced Security
Shared hosting is the least secure solution to store your site assets while cloud is probably the most secure. Thanks to the complex architecture of the clouds, the hacking attempts are less successful. For instance, a virus on a shared server may infect tens or hundreds of sites. The same virus is quickly isolated on a cloud infrastructure. Moreover, highly qualified engineers permanently monitor the cloud infrastructure.
Disadvantages of Cloud Hosting
Like everything man-made, cloud hosting doesn’t only have advantages, it has a few drawbacks that cause people to stay away from mass adoption. Two problems are of maximum importance.
Complexity
While the complex infrastructure of the cloud hosting platforms is OK for software engineers and developers, it’s a huge pain point for standard users. Cloud hosting comes with so many features and these put the users in trouble. Some providers managed to simplify the deployment process, but it’s significantly more complicated than hosting a site on an on-premise server.
Pricing
Webmasters are accustomed to the pricing plans of traditional hosting platforms. The pricing plans offer a perfect prediction of the yearly or monthly price spent on hosting. You can’t say the same for cloud hosting. Indeed, some cloud providers come with classic pricing plans. However, most cloud platforms stick to the principle – “pay as you use”. Theoretically, it’s quite a fair approach, but it’s not simple to predict the monthly costs. It’s a problem for startups or projects on a budget. On top of that, the prices of cloud hosting are still restrictive for many budgets. Probably, thanks to the mass adoption the prices will go down in the near future.
Over to You
Cloud hosting is a huge challenge for webmasters. Many online apps, global businesses, and big sites have already switched to cloud hosting. Pay attention to the fact that cloud hosting is part of a bigger trend – cloud computing. Wrapping up, everything is moving into the cloud and you should be an early adopter to have a competitive edge over your competitors.