What Is Cloud Hosting?

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Cloud hosting employs a virtual server to host websites. In comparison, traditional web hosting services usually house one or multiple sites on one physical server.

If you’re wondering whether cloud web hosting fits your needs better, this guide will help answer that question.

We’ll explore all the cloud hosting essentials – from how it works to what types of websites can benefit from it. Then, we’ll compare cloud hosting to other types of web hosting.

How Does Cloud Hosting Work?

Cloud hosting works through virtualization. It’s a technology that splits a physical server into multiple virtual machines called cloud servers. Then, these connect to create a single network for hosting a website.

Due to its interconnected cloud structure, this type of hosting is also called cluster server hosting.

Cloud hosting’s underlying infrastructure makes it different from traditional web hosting. The latter typically uses a centralized approach, where a single server stores several sites at once.

The main benefits of using cloud hosting solutions include:

• High availability. When one server fails, the rest will cover for it and keep the website running. This makes cloud hosting more reliable than traditional web hosting, where a site has to rely on its server being up at all times.
• Traffic load balancing. When the website experiences traffic, the infrastructure will spread it across the cloud servers. This helps maintain the site performance as it sees more visitors.
• Scalability. With cloud hosting, webmasters aren’t limited to the bandwidth, storage, or computing power available from a single server. They can use additional resources in the virtual environment to support their site’s growth.
• Greater security. Cloud hosting is generally less prone to disasters and physical malfunctions since it uses multiple servers in a virtual environment. Moreover, the load balancing feature can help prevent DDoS attacks.

What Types of Websites Use Cloud Hosting?

The usual types of websites that use cloud hosting are eCommerce stores, news publications, search engines or aggregators, social networks, and other high-traffic projects.

Basically, it’s perfect for all websites that need plenty of processing power, bandwidth, and disk space to accommodate many visitors and the high amount of files and data they store.

The cloud hosting architecture makes it easy to anticipate traffic surges – which usually happen during big sales or when a blog post goes viral. The load balancing will ensure that the traffic doesn’t overwhelm the resources of any virtual server.

Furthermore, some of these websites may require tighter security to handle sensitive data, like customer information and payment details.

In this case, they may opt for a private cloud as opposed to a public cloud. It usually comes with a dedicated cloud infrastructure, hosted on a private network to prevent unauthorized parties from accessing it.

For these reasons, web hosts generally charge more for cloud hosting services than shared or VPS, which are usually more suitable for small to medium-sized sites.

Differences Between Cloud Hosting and Other Types of Web Hosting

Before building a website, it’s essential to understand which type of web hosting you should use for it. The service you pick should provide ample resources and optimal performance to support the site without overblowing the budget.

This section will compare cloud hosting with two traditional hosting services, shared and VPS, to help you make the right decision.

Cloud Hosting vs Shared Hosting

Traditional shared hosting isn’t as powerful as its cloud counterpart. Even so, it is a suitable solution for those looking to build a personal website or a small online store.

In this type of hosting, one server will hold multiple websites, all of which share its resources.

Because of the shared nature of the server, it can handle only a limited amount of traffic – between 10 to one hundred thousand monthly visitors. The exact amount depends on the bandwidth, storage capacity, and processing power available.

Avoid hitting the resource usage limit to prevent any performance or security issues.

Here are the pros and cons of shared hosting:

Pros

• Affordable. The price for shared hosting typically costs between $1/month and $10/month. Cloud hosting, on the other hand, has a wider price range – from $10/month to $70+/month. For more details, read how much web hosting costs.
• Beginner-friendly. Webmasters don’t need any technical knowledge to be able to manage their hosting. Moreover, the setup process from payment to registration generally takes a few clicks.
• Easy maintenance. With shared hosting, the web hosts will usually handle the back-end aspects to optimize performance and security.

Cons

• Lacks reliability. The website performance will depend on the traffic, site size, and security measures of other users that share the space. If one site gets compromised, it’s likely that others will too.
• Lacks scalability. Unlike cloud hosting, webmasters can only use the allocated amount of processing power, bandwidth, and disk space given by the hosting provider. Should they need more resources, they will need to upgrade to a more comprehensive plan.

Cloud Hosting vs VPS Hosting

VPS is short for virtual private server. It’s similar to shared hosting as multiple users share a single server.

However, it is different because it uses virtualization, the same technology powering cloud hosting to create separate server partitions. That way, every user gets a dedicated resource pool to support their website rather than sharing one with other webmasters.

For this reason, VPS is often considered as the next step once a website has outgrown its shared hosting plan. It is also much more comparable to cloud hosting in terms of performance.

Other than that, users will get full root access to their own server, enabling them to configure the hosting environment to their exact needs. Usually, this is not available with managed cloud or shared hosting services.

Below are the advantages and disadvantages of VPS web hosting:

Pros

• Reliable performance. Having a dedicated server space ensures that the issues of one website won’t affect the other sites.
• Full root access. This feature is useful for technologically-savvy users who need to install a custom operating system or software for their projects.
• Dedicated IP address. Most web hosting providers include this with their VPS plans. Compared to a shared IP address, it’s a much safer option as it will protect your email reputation, preventing your website from being associated with spammy sites.

Cons

• Technical skills required. Most VPS hosting services come unmanaged, so some server management knowledge will be necessary to get your project hosted properly. Because of this, VPS is usually less beginner-friendly than cloud hosting.

Does Hostinger Offer Cloud Hosting Services?

Yes, we do. Here at Hostinger cloud hosting services use the latest technology to ensure the best performance, such as CloudLinux with LVE containers to isolate resources for each hosting account.

To help you choose from the three offered cloud hosting solutions, here’s a comparison table of these hosting plans:

How Do IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS Relate to Cloud Hosting?

IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are three types of cloud-based business models. This means that they use the cloud infrastructure to deliver their services.

Let’s explore the differences between each model.

IaaS stands for infrastructure as a service. Businesses of this type typically offer cloud-based computing resources, such as servers and storage, for companies to run their operations.

Many organizations now opt to buy from IaaS companies instead of building an on-premise IT system, which can be costly and difficult to maintain. In comparison, cloud services scale easily, and businesses only need to pay for the resources they use.

An excellent example of an IaaS company is Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing platform that stores Netflix’s movie and series database.

PaaS is short for a platform as a service and refers to companies offering cloud-based frameworks that developers can use to build applications.

Unlike IaaS, these vendors will manage the cloud server resources for the client, so they can focus on creating their projects.

An example of a PaaS platform is Google App Engine. With this service, users can create applications without having to worry about infrastructure management.

Finally, SaaS is software as a service. In this business model, companies use the cloud to deliver a full-fledged application that people can access through a web browser or mobile application. The Google Workspace suite, which includes Google’s Workspace webmail, is an example of such software.

The Future of Cloud Hosting

Small businesses and big companies are constantly looking for the best solutions to optimize their workload and end-user experience.

Cloud hosting plays a significant role in that. Benefits like easy scalability, maximum availability, high traffic resilience, and resistance against hardware failure mean their online business can serve customers at any time.

So, it is no wonder that there has been a rise in cloud computing migration. 61% of companies have relocated their operations to the cloud network in the past year. 46% of businesses found they have reduced their expenses significantly after the migration, so this move is likely to continue in the future.

What Is Cloud Hosting: A Summary

Cloud web hosting uses a virtual network of cloud servers to host a single site. It is different from traditional hosting, which stores one or multiple sites on a single server.

The primary benefit of cloud hosting is reliability. When one cloud server is down, other servers can take its place to keep the website online. It is also less prone to hardware failure, and webmasters can scale their hosting resources as needed to anticipate traffic spikes.

As such, it is the go-to solution for large-scale projects like enterprise websites, eCommerce stores, online marketplaces, and search engines.

If cloud web hosting sounds like the right solution for you, Hostinger offers three plans ranging from $9.99/month to $29.99/month. With CloudLinux technology, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, Cloudflare integration to enable CDN, and global data centers, your site will be up and running at all times.