Whether you are planning to start a new website for your business, or your eCommerce website simply outgrew the potential of your current hosting plan, cloud hosting can be a solution that trumps the traditional hosting.
In the last decade, every business is thinking about moving or is already in cloud computing. The benefits of Software as a Service and cloud computing are increased productivity, and low costs, the dream sentence for any business owner. By analogy, cloud hosting offers a similar concept that outweighs the benefits of traditional hosting.
Simply speaking, cloud hosting is a virtual structure that can store data across multiple servers. The data is accessed via the internet, and all the servers form a virtual storage space with your website’s data being spread across multiple servers. This way your data is accessible from any location, and even more important – safe even if one of the servers goes down.
Redundancy
One of the main benefits of cloud hosting is its server redundancy. By relocating data across multiple servers, and mirroring your data on multiple locations, any problem can be solved by site backup, and very fast. As opposed to traditional servers where hosting keeps everything on one machine. In case anything happens, there are backups that can help, but it is a timely process, and you don’t want your website to be offline a millisecond more than it has to.
Location is no longer an issue
Traditional hosting has servers that are physically tied to a certain location and can’t be moved. This doesn’t matter much in case you are hosting locally and have a local business. But if you decide to go globally and offer your services in different parts of the world, your traditional hosting might become a problem. When server location is physically far from visitors, loading times and website speed might suffer, causing visitors to wait, which is the one thing nobody wants. And not only that, your SEO can be affected, decreasing your rankings on SERPs
With cloud hosting, your data can be moved to servers fairly close to the location of interest, and by doing that you are increasing speed and lowering the load times of your website. This way, all of your customers will have a great experience, no matter the location they are on.
Scalability
One of the best things about cloud hosting lies in its virtual nature. In order to scale up or down, cloud hosting can simply expand to multiple servers and provide additional resources for your infrastructure. This can be useful when your website has unexpected surges of visitors, or when you have gradual, but consistent growth. And the best thing about cloud hosting is that scaling is often available via the control panel, without having to wait for approval from your provider. Whilst if you are using traditional hosting, scaling often requires investment into infrastructure and additional costs for services and resources, whether you use them all the time or not.
Flexible pricing and plans
Many hosting providers include cloud hosting as an option in their plans, so you need to take advantage of offers that usually come with additional benefits like a free domain name or additional hardware resources.
Picking the right provider can make a world of difference, so look for reviews of the most popular platforms and see which cloud hosting plan offers the things that you need for the right price. You should also consider additional benefits, like server locations, dedicated IP, SSL, CloudFlare protection, integrated caching, and good uptime. Also, look for ones that have a trial period that can help you figure out if this hosting is the right one for you, or that you must move to the next.
High availability and uptime
Traditional hosting relies on physical servers to keep your website up and running. In case anything goes south, there are redundancy mechanisms that can help you keep your website online, but they usually take time, and your website might be offline more than you went it.
Cloud hosting approaches this problem from an architectural point. Its distributed nature allows your site to be on multiple servers, which means that even if one of these servers go down, your uptime will not be affected. With no single point of failure, cloud hosting ensures that your website is up and running no matter what.
Bleeding edge tech
As with cloud computing, with cloud hosting, all the latest technologies are at your disposal because you are not bound to just one physical server. Cloud hosting is fully managed in most of the plans, which means that there is a team of people dedicated to making sure you get the latest and greatest tech updates, without even knowing it.
By implementing the latest patches, and updates, your website support is making sure your performance is always the best keeping your website on top of its game all the time.
Improved security
In the business environment security is one of the most important factors, and it is also one of the main reasons why business owners adopt cloud hosting over more traditional hosting types. Instead of using dedicated servers with resources that only you can use, protecting your sensitive data in the process, you can save your money with cloud hosting.
Since cloud hosting relies on distributed network infrastructure, it has multiple layers of security: data, network, application, and physical, ensuring there is no eavesdropping on any point of your data flow. Some cloud hosting providers also have additional security options like encryption, backup recovery, data isolation, biometric identity management, firewalls, and a lot more that you can use to further secure your sensitive data.
Also, security breaches like lost laptops with sensitive data can become a big problem, and these are the things that can happen to anyone. With cloud hosting, all your sensitive data is stored in the cloud, and you can access it no matter how many computers are stolen. Even more so, you can revoke access to stolen laptops or wipe the data on them remotely so that it does not get into the wrong hands.
All pluses, no minuses
With all the benefits, and almost no drawbacks cloud hosting represents new technology that is taking over the world by storm, and you should consider buying a ticket on this train. The fact is cloud computing is taking over traditional hosting, little by little, and sooner or later you will need to move to the cloud.
The real question is are the ability to pay only for the resources that you require, scale them when the time comes, improve your security, and availability enough reasons for you to transfer to cloud hosting right now?
