What is cloud hosting and who needs it?

Cloud hosting is more than just a marketing term thrown around. It's a type of hosting that provides scalability, redundancy, and can be more cost effective for the right users. Unfortunately, the phrase cloud has been overly used and misrepresented so understanding what it is and what benefits it has is not the easiest thing to unpack. I've written this explainer to help you understand what cloud really is and whether you need it. This can help you pick the best web hosting for you.

What is cloud hosting?

To understand cloud hosting, we first need to understand traditional hosting. In traditional web hosting you rent a server that contains resources. Resources are the things your website needs to run. The three main resources are CPU, RAM, and storage.

You either share these resources through shared hosting. Share them virtually through through VPS hosting or, don't share them at all with dedicated hosting. The main characteristic here is that this is one physical server with a direct link between the website and the resources in the server.

With cloud hosting the resources don't belong to individual servers. Instead the resources exist in a pool and websites can use what they need when they need it.

You can think of shared hosting like sitting around a table with a bowl of food in the middle. You don't have your own plate everyone just grabs from what's available. If there is a greedy eater at the table. You're going to get less, and you might end up hungry.

VPS hosting is the same scenario but you have your own plate. At the beginning of the meal everyone takes what they want and puts it on their plate. This is much better because greedy eaters won't take food from you and you always know how much food you have.

Dedicated is the same scenario but you're sitting at the table by yourself. Great if you have a big appetite but can be very wasteful.

Cloud is different. Instead of food being served in the middle of the table and people taking what they want at the beginning or free-for-all style cloud is like having your own waiter. Ask for something on the menu whenever you want it and the waiter will bring it immediately.

Benefits of cloud hosting

Scalability

The main benefit of cloud hosting is scalability. By this I mean that you can add and remove resources for your site at the click of a button or automatically. The resources in cloud hosting are not attached to one server so you can pull resources from the entire network.

With traditional hosting you would need to physically add or remove a CPU, RAM, or storage when you needed it which takes time, is risky, and can result in downtime.

Redundancy

Redundancy is another word for duplication. In cloud hosting your site and backups can be duplicated and stored in many different locations (called geo-redundancy). So if the storage fails, no problem, it's already ready to be used in a different location. If a disaster happens that causes the power to be cut off from a datacenter or a datacenter is destroyed entirely. No problem! Your site was never offline because there was another copy in another datacenter.

Cost-effectiveness

It seems counter-intuitive that a type of hosting that has additional features can be more cost effective but it can. At scale, it's cheaper to use cloud resources for redundancy and scalability because you don't need to own and maintain additional equipment. The cost effectiveness is only there at scale though. Unless you will benefit from scalability and redundancy, there is no need to pay extra for cloud.

Who needs cloud hosting?

If your website doesn't need many resources and doesn't see big fluctuations in traffic like a blog or portfolio, shared hosting is absolutely fine. It's the cheapest type of hosting if you're not very technical and you won't suffer any of the negative aspects of shared hosting.

If you need to guarantee resources for your site and you know the resource requirements are the same every month, then using a VPS is a better choice than shared hosting. So, the best VPS hosting is a good option for established sites that get frequent regular visitors that don't need the benefits of redundancy.

Dedicated is for when you need additional security requirements and/or have a website or websites that demand a lot of resources. Dedicated hosting is not that popular anymore and is generally being replaced with cloud hosting because it provides all the benefits of dedicated hosting but cheaper and also has some additional bonusses. Unless you're dealing with highly sensitive information or your business needs are super high like a web developer managing multiple sites and applications, there isn't much need to think about dedicated hosting.

You can benefit from cloud hosting in the following scenarios

New businesses

When starting a new business the last thing you want to be dealing with is hosting issues. You also wont know for sure how many resources you need until you start getting site visits and then, what happens if you get more than expected? Opting for cloud hosting at the beginning can save you hassle and money in the long run. Once you have established what the regular visits to your site are and what resources they require you can try a VPS server to save money;

Online stores

Servers for online stores are doing a lot more heavy lifting than servers for blogs and portfolios due to larger databases, unique users, shopping carts, and taking payments. When a site is the main revenue source it's also a lot more important to make sure it's online all the time. Online stores also get higher fluctuations in traffic from things like promotions or festivals.

Cloud hosting helps alleviate these pressures on servers to ensure that an online store is always ready to go and always has the best user experience.

There are plenty of studies that show that slow sites lose revenue so spending more on cloud hosting can pay for itself in additional sales and higher ranking in searches.

Types of cloud hosting

You might see cloud hosting packaged in many different forms. Some is just fancy marketing. Some is genuine. To help you navigate the market I've broken down some of the key cloud packages.

Shared cloud

It seems odd to say shared cloud because it's technically not shared in the traditional sense and in another sense all cloud is shared. So, what is shared cloud?

Shared cloud is essentially a virtual server with many websites sharing that virtual server. It's the same as the example I gave earlier of people eating at a table from a central pot in the middle. An amount of cloud resources are allocated to that space and the websites have to share whats there.

Many hosting companies now are based on cloud infrastructure and sell shared hosting this way, Some still call it shared, some call it shared cloud.

If shared servers are managed properly then from a users perspective it's essentially the same. If a hosting company is charging more because their shared is cloud, check what cloud benefits the plan has. Are there offs-site backups? If not, then it's not worth the extra price tag.

Cloud VPS

Cloud VPS is the same as above. A virtual environment is created and resources are reserved for it. This is the most common form of cloud hosting and usually comes with all the benefits of cloud like geo-redundancy and scalability. This is the most suitable type of hosting for online stores and growing businesses, or sites that require a custom server environment.

Cloud hosting round up

To summarise, cloud hosting is a type of infrastructure on which hosting plans can be created and managed. Cloud hosting adopts traditional hosting methodology but brings with it scalability and redundancy that traditional hosting cannot provide.

Cloud hosting is excellent for websites that have large fluctuations in site visits, new businesses that don't know what their baseline requirements are, and for online stores that depend on excellent user experience and being always online.