High quality web hosting services are the cornerstone of most thriving big and small businesses with an online presence. Web hosting is a service that allows your business to post a website or webpage to the internet to market your products/services to your target market and generate leads. Minimal downtime, seamless performance, and fast loading are some of the benefits you get from the best web hosting services. As you search the market for the right web hosting services provider, you will come across two major choices – traditional web hosting and cloud web hosting. Cloud web hosting is a relatively new platform that offers a full gamut of services for both budding and existing businesses. To help you get a clear picture when choosing web hosting services, this blog post makes a comparison between Cloud Web Hosting vs Traditional Web Hosting.
Cloud Web Hosting and Traditional Web Hosting: Does it Make a Difference?
Choosing the right hosting is essential for the site’s speed & security. One of the most common dilemmas that business owners face is whether they should switch their website from tried-and-true traditional hosting to sleek and modern cloud hosting. There isn’t an obvious answer to this question because there are so many things to take into account. It would be safe to say that the choice between cloud web hosting and traditional web hosting will depend on your specific needs and goals. So, what’s the difference between cloud web hosting and traditional web hosting?
- Infrastructure: Cloud hosting uses a network of servers in different locations to host websites, while traditional hosting uses a single server or a group of servers located in a single location. This has implications on the performance and reliability of the hosting solution.
- Scalability: Cloud hosting allows you to easily scale up or down the resources of your website. Traditional hosting typically requires you to purchase a fixed amount of resources, which may not be sufficient if your website experiences sudden spikes in traffic.
- Cost: While traditional hosting typically requires you to pay a fixed monthly or annual fee, regardless of your resource usage, the opposite is true for cloud hosting. When you opt for cloud-based servers, you don’t need to commit to specific resource bandwidths upfront. Instead, you can scale up or down as per the changing needs of your business.
- Maintenance: Cloud hosting providers typically handle the maintenance and updates of the hosting infrastructure, while traditional hosting requires you to manage these tasks yourself.
When is the Right Time to Move From Traditional Web Hosting to Cloud Web Hosting?
It can often be confusing to ascertain the right time for your business to move from traditional web hosting to a cloud-based service. In this section, we will discuss several factors to consider in order to make the right decision:
- Traffic patterns: If you have a website or software that experiences fluctuating traffic patterns, such as seasonal spikes or irregular traffic, cloud hosting may be a more cost-effective option as it allows you to pay only for the resources you use.
- Performance: If you are experiencing performance issues with your current hosting solution, such as slow loading times or downtime, cloud hosting may be a great choice. Major cloud server hosting providers also offer state-of-the-art infrastructure to help take your business to the next level, without having to invest in costly hardware.
- Future growth: If you are expecting your business to grow significantly in the near future, cloud hosting may be the right choice, as it allows you to easily scale up your resources as and when needed.
- Reliability: If your website is mission-critical and downtime is not an option, cloud hosting may be the right choice, as it offers high availability through the use of multiple servers in different strategic locations.
- Security requirements: In today’s all-digital environment, web security has become more critical than ever. If you want access to advanced security to protect your data and prevent unauthorized access, it is advisable to go for reputable cloud backup solutions.
Biggest Advantages of Cloud Hosting
It goes without saying that cloud hosting comes with a plethora of benefits for businesses of all sizes. Here are some of the biggest advantages of cloud hosting:
- The best cloud hosting service allows you to easily scale up or down the resources of your website, such as CPU, RAM, and storage, depending on the needs of your application. This helps to ensure that your website can handle sudden spikes in traffic without crashing or downtime.
- Cloud hosting services like AWS website hosting allow you to only pay for the resources you use. This feature can be especially useful for start-ups that aren’t sure of the traffic they can expect in the coming months.
- Cloud server providers ensure the high availability of resources by distributing your website across multiple servers in different locations. This ensures that your website is always available, even if one of the servers goes down. This particular feature can be useful for businesses that need to ensure a 24x7x365 online presence.
- Cloud hosting allows you to choose the resources you need, such as the operating system, programming languages, and databases, making it easy to customize your hosting environment to meet your specific needs.
- Cloud hosting providers generally have robust security measures in place to protect your data. These measures include encryption, firewalls, and regular security updates, among others.
Comparison Between Cloud Web Hosting and Traditional Web Hosting
Traditional Web Hosting
- Hardware: In traditional web hosting, organizations have their own servers, backups, recovery processes, and connectivity. Setting up a complete IT infrastructure represents huge initial costs for organizations, but gives them additional control and validation.
- Shared Resources: The in-house servers are devoted to a particular organization or for a single purpose. This gives organizations the freedom to deploy tailored features and security measures.
- Scalability: Whenever traffic on a website exceeds the projected expectations, or there is a need to upscale server due to frequent intensive computing tasks – Organizations need to purchase extra space on the server and larger bandwidth along with more in-house IT skills, and these add to the cost.
- Extended Deployment Time: In traditional web hosting, deployment takes time. Organizations need time and money to set up servers, load software, connectivity, and other such infrastructure requirements according to their need.
- Large Setup Costs: Setting up a dedicated local server, employing in-house IT personnel, paying fixed fees to purchase particular bandwidth and space on a host server, and hosting costs, usually add up to a large amount.
- Environmental Downsides: There is a lot of energy consumption in traditional web hosting, which, in turn, adds up to the organisation’s energy bills. It also increases direct and indirect carbon emissions.
Cloud Web Hosting
- Pay as You Go: Cloud hosting allows providers to charge users only for resources consumed, rather than a flat fee for the amount of data that the customer projects they will use.
- Dedicated Support: The latest cloud computing technology ensures that your resources are dedicated to you and not shared by others. This includes RAM and CPU, according to the plan you choose.
- Negligible Startup Cost: In cloud web hosting, infrastructure is typically provided by a third party and need not be purchased. Also, less in-house IT skills are required for the implementation of projects that use cloud computing.
- Shared Resources: If other users overload their cloud servers, this will have no impact on your server because resources are dedicated. Cloud servers don’t suffer from hardware problems, and the shutdown of one server will make no difference to the performance of your website, as the other servers in the cloud network will automatically take over.
- Easy Scalability: In this regard, we should mention that cloud servers scale very well. It is very easy and fast to add upgrades (CPU, Memory, disk space) to a cloud server.
Way Forward
These are some of the major features of traditional and cloud web hosting. Cloud web hosting is still evolving and most businesses have embraced it owing to its flexibility, easy scalability, and other advantages. If you are looking for a provider that offers customized cloud hosting services such as AWS website hosting, dedicated server hosting, etc., look no further than i2k2 Networks. To learn more about our hosting services and packages or get answers to your questions, call us today at +91-120-466-3031/+91-97-1177-4040 or email sales@i2k2.com. You may also fill out our contact form and we will reach out to your shortly.