The Benefits of Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is a form of web hosting that is growing in popularity. This is due to the many benefits that include the potential to save on costs, scalability, and less chance of downtime.
Cost Savings
An important benefit of cloud hosting is that it can save on costs. With cloud hosting you pay for hosting resource, such as bandwidth, as you use it. When traffic increases extra resource is available to your website and this will automatically be deployed, but you don’t pay for it when you are not using it. With other forms of hosting you hire servers based on the amount of traffic you expect. This means having to hire enough servers to cope with expected traffic which potentially means paying for more than is necessary. This is not a worry with cloud hosting. It is almost like paying for hosting depending on the amount of traffic to the website. When traffic is high you pay more for your hosting as more resource is required, but when traffic is slow the hosting costs are lower.
Scalability
Cloud hosting can be advantageous to growing businesses. As a business expands the popularity of their website typically does too, and more traffic leads to more bandwidth being required. This can lead to problems in term of hosting with more servers costing more money. If a websites increases in popularity too rapidly it can make it hard for the hosting to keep up with it. Acquiring more servers cannot always be done instantly meaning that in the short term a website, and therefore a business, can suffer. These potential issues can be mitigated with cloud hosting. Hosting resource can be easily adapted to meet a website’s needs, meaning bandwidth can be easily increased to meet demand.
Less Chance of Downtime
By opting for cloud hosting website owners can limit the possibility of downtime. Downtime can be a particular problem when experiencing spikes in traffic due to a lack of resource to cope with this. As resource can more easily keep up with traffic, cloud hosting is less susceptible to downtime. There is also the issue of physical servers versus cloud servers. If a website is hosted on a single physical server and there is a problem with this server then it can cause website downtime. This doesn’t have to be the case with cloud hosting as the load is spread across a number of servers. If one server fails then another can take the load meaning a website is unaffected.
Backup and Data Storage
With cloud hosting there is less chance of losing data. If this is stored on a physical server and the server blows up or there is a fire in the building where it is stored then this data will be lost. As being stored in the cloud means there is no physical server it means this risk doesn’t exist.
No Need to Update Hardware
If a website is hosting on dedicated servers then these might need constantly updating. This is not the case with cloud hosting as there are no physical servers to update.
Which Types of Websites can Benefit?
Growing businesses can benefit from cloud hosting. As traffic increases it is simpler, and potentially cheaper, to increase their bandwidth than if using physical servers. Resource is readily available when required without there being the need to pay for servers that might not be needed. Websites with fluctuating traffic can also find cloud hosting advantageous. This includes season websites, for examples Christmas related sites or holiday company sites that might be particularly popular leading up to the summer period. These websites can benefit from having extra resource available at busy times without having to pay for it all year round.
Andrew Marshall ©
The Security Benefits of Cloud Hosting, Colocation and Managed Hosting
One of the many factors to consider when choosing web hosting is security. For some websites this is something that is of utmost importance. There are differing security benefits for each type of hosting.
An important consideration is whether to opt for shared hosting or dedicated hosting. Dedicated hosting is more secure than shared hosting for a number of reasons. It is not impacted by other users and other website that same way as shared hosting can be. Sharing a server with multiple websites can lead to a number of security issues. If the owner of one site on the server is able to load scripts then it can be possible for them to hack into files owned by other users. Depending on the setup and security measures put in place, shared hosting customers may be able to read and execute files owned by another customer. There is also the issue of the way that bandwidth is dealt with. There may be specific limits set for each site but where this is not the case, and one site uses a large amount of bandwidth, then other sites can be impacted, in a worst case scenario meaning they are offline. Security measures can be put in place with shared hosting but many would argue it cannot be as secure as dedicated hosting.
For websites where security is essential dedicated hosting should be used, but which type of dedicated hosting?
Cloud Hosting
From a purely physical point of view a website is not stored on a physical server with cloud hosting. Data in the cloud is encrypted and secured in multiple data centres and some claim this makes it safer than storing data on one server in a single location. With other forms of hosting a website will be offline, possibly for a long period of time, if the building where the server is stored burns down or all power is lost. This is not a problem with cloud hosting as it is stored on several “virtual servers” meaning unaffected ones can pick up the slack where there are problems with a single server.
Colocation
There are many security benefits of colocation compared with hosting a site at your own premises. Data centres have all of the necessary security measures put in place, such as measures to ensure only authorised personnel can gain access to different areas, CCTV and fire protection. It is unlikely a small business, for example, will be able to have as stringent security measures as this at their own premises due to the costs that would be incurred.
Managed Hosting
Managed hosting carries some of the same security benefits as colocation, such as the strong onsite security. There are also additional benefits, though. Compared with looking after your own server (as is the case with colocation) there is the benefit that a websites hosting will be constantly monitored so if there is a security breach it will be spotted immediately and quickly resolved.
There is much to consider when choosing web hosting and security is just one of these. There is less likely to be security issues when a site is hosted on a dedicated server. Cloud hosting, managed hosting and colocation all have their own security benefits.
Andrew Marshall ©
Can Web Hosting be 100% Reliable?
For a website to be visible to the public it must be hosted on a web server. There are a variety of hosting types on the market for website owners with different packages suitable depending on the type of website, the content of the website and the amount of traffic that is expected. It is generally considered that, whatever type of hosting is chosen, it is impossible that it can be one-hundred percent reliable with a website always live. The general consensus is that there is always going to be downtime at some point. Sometimes hosting is effected by maintenance tasks that have to be carried out on servers and there are times when problems cannot be completely avoided. For this reason hosting companies will not guarantee one-hundred percent uptime, although they will usually guarantee a percentage that is above ninety-nine percent.
Despite the perception that website hosting cannot be one-hundred percent reliable there is a possibility that a situation can be achieved whereby a site is almost certainly never offline. But how is this possible? If you have a hundred data centres in a hundred different locations (possible in different countries) and a backup of your website in every single one, then it is extremely unlikely that they are all going to be experiencing problems or are all going to be down at the same time. This would only ever really happen if the site was deliberately targeted. The reality is that it would probably take less than one-hundred backups in different data centres for this to be achievable. Ten data centres would possibly be enough. Where this is the case guarantees of one-hundred percent uptime would be unlikely (as in theory them all being down simultaneously is still possible) but in reality a website is extremely unlikely to ever be offline.
So, it is possible that a website can be live all of the time. This is, though, extremely expensive. Hosting a site in one data centre is expensive enough so multiplying this several times over simply as a security measure will cost a lot. For certain types of sites it is worth this cost, though. This cost can be reduced, however, with the use of cloud hosting.
Cloud hosting is an increasingly popular form of web hosting. Rather than purchasing a dedicated server where a website is hosted, utilising cloud hosting means that the required hosting resources are spread across several servers. This reduces the likelihood of significant downtime, thus increasing reliability.
So cloud hosting has security benefits. As well as the regular cloud hosting security advantages it can also be used to make one-hundred percent uptime more of a possibility but at a cheaper cost than is otherwise the case. As the load can be spread across many servers it means using multiple backups in multiple data centre may not be necessary.
Will there ever be a time when one-hundred percent uptime can be guaranteed? This may or may not become possible in the future. What is likely, though, is that circumstances could be achieved whereby any downtime is extremely unlikely and cloud hosting is something that will make this both more achievable and achievable at a lower cost.
Andrew Marshall ©