What is Cloud Hosting?

what is cloud hosting

Cloud hosting is a popular web hosting solution that any seasoned IT developer and web designer will vouch for. Most big corporations and e-commerce websites rely upon cloud hosting because of the automated scalability it offers. So while cloud computing has been around for some time, many are not aware of the prowess of this cutting-edge hosting product.

Below we’ll discuss the different components of cloud hosting and why it’s an ideal hosting solution for businesses.

What is the exact definition of cloud hosting?

Hosting solutions like dedicated and shared draw their resources from just one machine, whereas in cloud hosting, the hosting providers rely upon multiple machines spread across the network that pulls out the computing resources (CPU, RAM). Therefore, if you’ve hosted your website in the cloud, the resources it needs to run are drawn from many servers and networks.

In the future, if your website’s needs grow, all you have to do is pay for the additional bandwidth/CPU/RAM that the new features of the website will need. This can be done without having to change the existing plan. So in a way, cloud hosting plans are similar to utility bills in that you pay for what you use – at least in the Cloud Servers format of the product.

While cloud servers are the ‘pure’ form of this product with unparalleled flexibility and processing power, many providers also have a more accessible version labeled variously as Cloud Hosting and Cloud Websites which is a partitioned cloud server with a management layer that is very similar to regular shared hosting with flexible resources such as CPU and RAM. In this form of the cloud, the root and OS-level access are usually not exposed to the customer, but the on-demand up-scaling of resources is available making it a very attractive proposition for new entrants to the cloud hosting genre.

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All the big players in the market bank on the cloud for their hosting solutions. Google is one such example. As the world’s leading search Engine Company, Google offers a wide range of products and is known to offer excellent service to its users. Google Maps for example is a popular web-based mapping service used by millions of users from across the globe. The usage of this application scales up and down, depending upon the time of the day. However, irrespective of the traffic on the network, Google Maps is the leading map service in the world and performs without a glitch. This stability can be attributed to the resources it draws from multiple servers on the network.

Netflix is yet another example that has shut down its entire physicals server and has moved completely to the cloud.

What are the different services offered under clouding hosting?

iaas-and-paas

Cloud hosting can be divided into two broad services:

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IaaS – IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service. Clients or companies who have complex requirements and are backed by a team of highly skilled and experienced IT professionals can take up virtual hardware space on the cloud. Around this, they can build up a software environment by installing a particular version of software, tools, or plugins that they need.  This cloud-hosting service offers better control of the server and clients can make changes as per the needs and requirements of their business.

PaaS– PaaS, or Product as a Service, is an easy-to-use option for professionals and clients who want to straight away deploy their website based on a platform hosted on the cloud server, without any fanfare. They rely upon the software environment offered by the hosting provider. It is an ideal cloud-hosting solution for novice webmasters and business owners who don’t want to be bothered by excessive technical investments.

What are the advantages of hosting your web app or website on the cloud?

scalable cloud hosting

Affordable – “Pay for what you need” makes cloud hosting quite affordable. This is apt from a budgeting point of view. For instance, you don’t have to put down a large figure to take care of the hosting needs from the start. You also don’t have to bootstrap. When the needs of your business grow, pay for the additional resources required for hassle-free website performance.

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Scalable & Stable– Cloud hosting is undoubtedly a highly scalable platform. Unlike dedicated and shared-hosting environments where resources are limited, the cloud automates bandwidth each time there’s a variation in web traffic. Secondly, cloud hosting is not a hardware-intensive platform. Irrespective of the size and volume of data, the cloud deploys it on various virtual machines across the network without eating up a lot of hardware space. Cloud infrastructure is ideal for businesses that deal in big data management, gaming, and cloud computing. These are evolving technological trends and require a dynamic hosting environment like cloud hosting.

Is cloud hosting safe?

is-cloud-hosting-safe

Unless the requirements mandate on-premise solutions like banks, defense, etc.  Cloud hosting is regarded as a very safe hosting solution. Whether you want to host a website, develop a product, or offer IT solutions to enterprises, this is your best bet. Having said that, it’s estimated that only 10 percent of the world’s data is currently stored in the cloud. A plausible explanation for this could be that several business owners feel insecure about storing sensitive company data on an external server. However, if one considers the instances of security breaches (a la Sony or Target) in recent times, it was from the internal database of the company, not the cloud.

While a threat to data security in a cloud environment cannot be ruled out, cloud hosting suffers from vulnerabilities similar to other hosting platforms in the market. Nevertheless, in a dynamic ecosystem where there’s an urgent need to optimize resources at an affordable price, cloud hosting is an undisputed winner. The security and safety of a cloud-hosting environment also depend on the service providers, and they often implement regular security patches to ensure that the data is safe.

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