Cloud Web Hosting - Info, Prices, Pros and Cons of Hosting Your Website in the Cloud

What Is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting is a popular form of hosting that is being used by more websites every single day. However, not everyone may know what cloud hosting is. To put it simply, a website that is hosted using a cloud hosting method actually operates on multiple servers that work together to provide the computing power to host that website. This is a stark contrast to more traditional website hosting in which a website would only be hosted on a single server.

The Pros and Cons of Cloud Hosting

As for the pros and cons of cloud hosting, the benefits are quite obvious. The main benefit is superior scalability over more traditional hosting packages. What this means is that as a website grows in popularity the website can simply take more bandwidth usage from the cloud of servers. This will allow a website to expand as its popularity increases without having to continually move to servers with ever higher bandwidth usage limits. This will also guarantee that a website rarely if ever experiences down time due to the amount of people logging onto that site.

Alternatively, if the website becomes visited less, it can simply release the unused servers back into the cloud. Another great benefit that is provided to website owners and businesses is that cloud hosting can be much more cost efficient. With traditional hosting, a website owner is charged the same price no matter how much bandwidth is used. With cloud hosting, however, that owner is only charged for what she uses. This seems more logical and fair. Better yet, the average cost for most websites is rather low. A person can expect to find prices that range from 15 cents to 25 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth used.

Because of these two benefits, cloud hosting is best suited for two different kinds of websites. First are websites that expect to grow in size incrementally in the near future. Second are websites that expect to experience higher rates of traffic at certain times and lower rates of traffic at other times. Unfortunately, there is a significant downside to cloud hosting as well. This downside comes from the lessened control over the security of a website. Under traditional hosting plans, all the information for a website is stored locally on a single server. In this kind of situation, attempting to guard that information against hackers, viruses, and other things that would do harm to a website is rather straight forward.

However, a website hosted on a cloud server is hosted on many different servers simultaneously. In this situation, maintaining tight control over a website’s security can become much more difficult. This is one of the reasons why cloud hosting may not be appropriate for companies who wish to store information like customer data and trade secrets on their websites. Still, cloud hosting may be greatly beneficial to many businesses and webmasters. However, a careful analysis between the benefits and downsides of cloud hosting should always be performed before reaching a decision.