What Is Cloud Hosting? Benefits of Cloud Hosting

So you are starting a new website, and you start looking for a valuable hosting provider that offers an excellent hosting service. Amongst the different hosting plans that they offer, you must’ve seen cloud hosting, but what is cloud hosting definition?

Cloud hosting is considered a type of web hosting known to use a few servers to balance out the website’s load and maximize the server’s uptime. Therefore, as a result, your website will pull resources from multiple servers, and usually, when one of them fails, there is always another server that keeps everything running.
In your day to day servers, the server is usually physically limited. Meaning, you can’t increase its hardware to make it more powerful, etc. But cloud hosting is different. As mentioned above, with cloud hosting, you pull resources from multiple servers, which can ultimately lead to affordable hosting that is both scalable and reliable.

What Exactly Does Cloud Hosting Do?

Well, to explain how exactly cloud hosting works, it’s better if we break it down so we can compare it to a single server. When you purchase a typical hosting, you will get a single server that holds all of your website’s data. Whenever a user visits your website, the server begins to present those data to the server.
On the other hand, cloud hosting is set up in a way where all of your website’s data are spread out throughout multiple servers, and whenever a user visits your website, the data will be pulled from various servers.
A cloud hosting server also has a physical setup, but it also has a virtualized servers running alongside it. Yes, it means you can pull almost infinite resources for your website as your website grows.

What Are the Benefits of Cloud Hosting?

1. Outstanding Uptime

The primary benefit of cloud hosting is its focus on uptime. The downside of the typical hosting services is that once the server goes down, your website will go down as well. Since cloud hosting is technically using multiple servers, your files are spread out through them. Whenever a server goes down for any reason, there is always another server with your data.

2. Affordable

In most cases, when you purchase a hosting plan, you have to pay a monthly fee regardless of the resources you are using. When it comes down to cloud hosting, you only pay for whatever resources that you are using.
For example, if you are expecting a high volume of users coming to your website, there is no need to upgrade the package you have purchased; You can simply scale your resources, and once the traffic goes back to normal, you can reduce the resources. This reason alone makes cloud hosting the most affordable hosting that you can purchase.

3. Unnecessary Environment

As mentioned before, with the typical hosting server, your website lives on a single server. If the server goes down for any reason, your website will be offline, and it wouldn’t be back up and running until the server is back online. With cloud hosting, you will have a concurrent version of your website that the host can load up almost immediately. Thus, you won’t even notice if one of the servers is down.

4. High Performance

Cloud servers are also known for being really fast. In addition to the cloud environment’s scaleable feature, cloud hosting is designed specifically to balance the load between multiple server environments. As a result, you will pull more resources, and therefore, your site will have great speed.

5. Safe Environment

With cloud hosting, your website is somewhat quarantined from the issues that the typical servers have. For example, being hacked, hardware issues, or in some cases, system overload. In case one of the hosting servers goes down, there is always another server to be utilized for your website.

Cloud Server Hosting

Different hosting providers offer powerful cloud server hostings. However, each hosting provider offers different types of cloud server hosting. Generally, there are two types of cloud hosting.

1. Dedicated for Applications

Some hosting providers offer pre-configured cloud hosting that is designed specifically for web applications. This type of configuration is known as SaaS, which stands for software as a service. There are some popular types of pre-configured cloud hosting for web applications. Server management applications, web applications and content management systems (CMSs), web application firewalls (WAFs), load balancers, and Virtual Private Networks are known as VPNs.

2. Different OS

Hosting providers offer their cloud hosting with different operating systems. However, the most popular ones are CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu Server that you can choose from.

Cloud Hosting Providers

It’s been a good few years ever since cloud hosting has changed the Infrastructure where third-party providers can offer servers, software, hardware, storage, and even networking to their clients through a pay-per-use payment method. This model is known as IaaS, which stands for Infrastructure as a service, and some of the most popular and huge companies that practice this method are AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.

For short, Amazon Web Services or AWS has been one of the top and only the dominant provider in the market. Since AWS is an Amazon company, they have many resources and man-power to offer hosting services in more regions and zones than their competitors.

Other than AWS, Google has been in the cloud scene for a good few years as well. They have been offering GCE, which stands for Google Compute Engine, whereas AWS offers Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 for short. These are just names that huge companies had to come up with for the services they offer. Falling in third is Microsoft Azure, which offers AVM, which stands for Azure Virtual Machines. One of Microsoft’s most popular cloud services is their famous Microsoft Office 365, which allows you to save your files on your PC and access it anywhere as long as the computer is connected to your account.

Conclusion

In this article, we talked about cloud hosting. Cloud hosting is the new trend when it comes down to hosting websites or even web applications due to the many benefits. A cloud hosting works differently compared to your typical hosting.
Rather than getting resources from a single server, cloud hosting pulls resources from multiple servers. If any of the servers go down due to any possible reason, there is always another server backing up your website and web applications.
Thus, it still has a 100% uptime. Moreover, with the IaaS method rising, three major companies practice this method, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine, offer third-party providers to sell their customers more resources, storage, servers, etc., based on their needs and a pay-per-use method.