Popular websites, like those by mass media outlets and large corporations, need the capability to support millions of visitors each day. That is why these organizations take advantage of cloud hosting.
Cloud hosting allows web servers to support more website traffic than their single hardware unit can. Even under strain, cloud hosting gives website access to more visitors and leads to better performing sites overall.
Even though other businesses use cloud hosting, is it right for your business’s website? Here’s everything you need to know about cloud hosting options so you can make a decision.
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How Did Cloud Hosting Begin?
Since the “single box” model of web servers became outdated, the most popular sites on the Internet were forced to find unique ways to keep their websites up and running.
In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a server platform. Due to this, AWS is given most of the credit for this innovative version of web hosting.
Though, today, many of the more commercial hosts we’ve included in our following lists offer cloud plans:
- Best web hosting Australia
- Best web hosting Canada
- Best web hosting Malaysia
- Best web hosting Singapore
- Best web hosting UK
If you don’t wish to go through the lists, here are reviews of a few that do it the best: Hostinger review, A2 Hosting review, Kinsta review, and SiteGround review.
Why Do Businesses Prefer Cloud Hosting?
What makes cloud hosting so unique is that it creates cluster servers that can far surpass the previous limits of approximately 10,000 customers. Thanks to cloud hosting, websites can accompany ten times the previous amount without worrying about crashes. There are other innovations that contributed to the creation of cloud hosting, such as:
- Increases in RAM
- More CPU cores available
- Multi-threaded processing
How Does Cloud Hosting Work?
The cluster servers used in cloud hosting use both dynamic network routing and load balancing to redirect user traffic. This traffic is redirected to hardware or virtual server instances in other data centers.
The software will then sync up stored files, cloned versions of the code, and the database. These changes allow units to power up or down automatically as the website traffic increases or decreases.
User account throttling, also known as “slashdotting,” can cause smaller websites to experience offline events when running important promotions with increased traffic. Because of this, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) plans for cloud hosting were developed. These specialized plans allow smaller websites to stay online no matter the traffic by targeting customers with shared hosting that have varying needs but similar principles.
What’s Included in Cloud Hosting Plans?
These are typical services included in cloud hosting plans:
- VPS partitions
- Optimized load balancing
- Reverse proxy servers
- Web page and file caching
What Web Servers are Used?
Nginx, Varnish Cache, and Redis are all web servers used in many popular cloud hosting solutions. These servers are equipped to optimize websites.
These websites have the popular CMS software to effectively optimize their website:
- WordPress
- Joomla
- Drupal
- Magento
HHVM, APC, or OPcache are other common services provided in PaaS plans that can provide overall better performances across many websites.
Public and Private Cloud Hosting – What’s the Difference?
Public
A public cloud, offered by PaaS, is created by a major IT company that makes data center hardware available to website publishers or other businesses on a commodity basis. These publishers and businesses are equipped with a range of integrated software packages meant for website hosting.
Some companies prefer to rent “bare metal” servers and operate a public cloud provider as their remote data centers. They do this by installing their own codes and software to use in web applications for hosting. Other website may opt for a more secure approach to the software stack and network security that is pre-installed onto the servers.
Businesses can save money thanks to public cloud hosting, especially when they can obtain software from industry experts rather than developing it themselves.
Private
Private clouds can be compared to small business data centers or traditional enterprises, since hardware is in the physical business of whoever operates the network. IT majors take advantage of bulk pricing sales on hardware for web servers and because the innovation of computer technology requires frequent upgrades, the public cloud model has been gaining popularity over the private data centers. Private clouds are praised by companies that need exact user privacy, data security, or development and programming requirements, but public clouds are starting to change this opinion.
Hybrid
The world’s biggest data center operations are operated by large public cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, Oracle, AWS, or Google to take care of internal business needs and customer requirements. These companies can offer services to businesses that are far beyond what they were previously capable of. This is thanks to the operations’ ability to scale and their expertise in web technology development and data center management. Integrators, which are contracting or outsourcing companies, are able to provide businesses with third-party services by creating data center solutions.
These solutions are based on the private or public cloud model, which varies on the requirements of the client. A combination of both approaches, known as a hybrid cloud, involves data and hardware hosted in-person and physically, but other requirements are outsourced through a different online service provider.
Cloud Hosting vs. Single Server
The average dedicated server for hosting is approximately equal to a computer in terms of hardware specifications, while website servers that are in data servers function similarly to mainframe computers of the past. Newer web processors can have 8 or even 16 multi-processors within one unit, CPUs that each have up to 24 cores, and servers that have the capability to support over 1 TB in RAM.
One web server can host more than 10,000 websites, but the same data must be copied onto multiple machine to comply with fail-safe precautions. “The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines” was published by Google in 2009, and encouraged people to visualize a “supercomputer” with all unified hardware in one data center. This represents the idea of cloud hosting. Because of this, single web servers can be separated into multiple virtual private servers (VPS) situations. Thanks to these advances in technology, the limits of traditional servers can be surpassed and the cloud computing model can continue to gain popularity.
Who Should Use Cloud Hosting?
No matter what requirements the website has, cloud hosting is available through many different plans to service everyone. A client like Netflix is capable of running their entire company on AWS, but smaller companies that are just starting out are able to build their web hosting business with EC2 architecture. Financial institutions like Capital One and Visa can take advantage of 100% uptime capabilities at all times while providing hardware for the military to the Pentagon. There are many businesses associated with Microsoft Windows through the ecosystem contract made with Azure to negotiate cloud hosting. Other clients associated with Oracle and IBM are known to do the same thing. However, government agencies and large companies spend over one hundred million dollars per year on IT services.
A lot of companies that are new to hosting start out with Google Cloud or AWS in order to have a high quality level of customer service, much like larger corporations throughout the world. HostGator, Bluehost, and Siteground are all examples of websites that offer PaaS cloud hosting options for around 10 dollars per month. There are also optimized stacks of software available that come with a Varnish/Nginx cache or a Redis integration.
For small website owners that run CMS software, retail cloud hosting solutions are well worth the investment. This is because these cloud hosting plans are designed to optimize loading speeds and improve the overall performance of the website according to the rules that large corporations spent millions creating. Website owners should opt for the cloud hosting plan that can accommodate for the traffic requirements for the website.
To help save money, it would be smart to look for the most affordable plan that still meets all your needs. Using PaaS plans that are just 10 dollars a month, website publishes can still benefit from the CMS performance tracking ang gains.
Who Should Not Use Cloud Hosting?
By using a shared hosting plan and never surpassing the limits of its service, simple HTML sites or others can typically use both plug-in and module-based tools to improve page caching and provide speeds that are equal to cloud hosting speeds. Some websites that do not have more than 100 people on their page at one time most likely do not need to convert to a cloud hosting solution. However, most sites can still benefit from PaaS plans that bring better servers, high-quality hardware, and faster page caching.
10 or even 20 websites at a time can be hosted by multi-site portfolio business owners. Every client deserves to know that their business is a safe. Tese business owners typically spend three dollars a month and do not experience problems with their service because there is barely any traffic on their website. An account throttle limit is usually used by shared website hosts to shut a website down if it surpasses a specific amount of resource use in the system.
On budget hosting plans, customers often never surpass the limits of the plan. However, many website owners do not need to break their business up into cluster services and can take advantage of search engine optimization (SEO) services from Google Pagespeed with a few setting adjustments. A lot of website hosts have already integrated shared existing platforms and the biggest perks of cloud hosting through the data centers. Thanks to these innovations, some of the best breakthroughs in the industry have gradually become mainstream.
