Cloud Hosting vs Shared Hosting

If you are considering putting your little piece of the world wide web on the internet, or perhaps you’re even a veteran blogger looking for a new home to host your site, you’ve probably heard a lot of buzz about ‘cloud’ hosting. Just what is cloud web hosting and how is it different from shared hosting?

You may find that there may be many differences between these two types of website hosting. What it really boils down to is what you need for your website. Here are some of the main differences.

Price

When it comes to shared server hosting, this is the most affordable on the market. A hosting company simply shares a web server so that their customers have a little bit of the same space. This cuts costs immensely, making it as cheap as even a few dollars a month.

Cloud hosting technology is still new and hosting companies are still learning to configure their cloud server architecture. Typically, while shared hosting charges a flat fee per month, cloud hosting charges by equipment and bandwidth usage. Even so, it still is considerably more expensive per month.

Reliability

When several websites take up space on a single web server problems are inevitable. A server may crash due to intensive traffic from a single website causing all other shared websites to suffer. A hosting company may not have an efficient routing system causing backup and additional crashes.

Cloud server technology uses load balancers and web server ‘clusters’ to create a very efficient and almost completely reliable system. Even if a single server crashes, others are ready to take over the load. Traffic is routed efficiently, and website requesters rarely have to wait for a website request.

While shared server hosting does have more problems, most companies still do have an efficient configuration. It’s just that cloud server configuration have proven to be much more reliable.

Technical Selection

With a shared hosting plan you rarely get to choose your equipment or software. Generally you are at the mercy of the hosting company to use their chosen brand of web server, processor speed, and operating system.

With cloud servers, hosting companies will frequently offer their clients a choice of system to choose from, including the number of CPUs, the amount of RAM, storage space, and the type of operating system.

Flexible

As mentioned above, cloud hosting is more flexible in how a client uses the system. A cloud client may want to use a similar system setup as a shared hosting client, but still get the reliability of the cloud architecture.

Scaleable

As your website grows in popularity you may want or need additional features you cannot get with a shared host such as a unique IP address, more bandwidth, and additional storage space. A cloud hosting client has the scalability to add additional equipment and features as their website grows.

While cloud computing is known for its high reliability, it still has a few years before cloud web hosting matches the price of a shared hosting plan. However, you should strongly consider what exactly you need for your website, taking price, reliability, and flexibility to mind.

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