Web hosting may be a must once you want your website to be up and running on the web, be it for online business, blogging or the other service. But with numerous web hosting solutions, it can get a touch confusing to settle on a perfect sort of hosting for your site.
Shared Hosting vs Cloud Hosting. These types of web hosting solutions are popular amongst users, each having their own pros and cons. So which one is that the best for your hosting requirements?
Myriads of companies choose shared hosting thanks to their cheaper rates, whereas cloud hosting comes with its own perks!
There are some major differences between shared and cloud hosting. Understanding the distinction can help you choose the best service type for your business.
Below we’ve comprehensively explained the most differences between shared hosting and cloud hosting, so you’ll make an informed decision:
Let’s dive in:
What is Shared Hosting?
Shared hosting is that the hottest hosting solution because it is cheaper and simply available to deploy. In such a kind of hosting, one physical server and its resources are utilized by multiple users. Each user shares a selected amount of bandwidth and resources like disc space, bandwidth, RAM, etc.
Each user can run multiple sites on their account, so one server might find yourself hosting hundreds and thousands of internet sites at an equivalent time. If other website on a shared server uses multiple resources, your website might be getting slow.
Hence, shared hosting is sweet for little websites who have a really limited budget. it’s also perfect if:
You want to travel online quickly, because it is straightforward to deploy
You do not want to scale at large, since the resources are going to be limited
You do not need to serve high traffic
Benefits of Shared Hosting
Easy to Deploy: one among the most important advantages of shared hosting is that it’s easy to deploy and it gets your site live quickly.
Hosting Administration: Shared hosting provider manages all responsibilities of maintaining and upgrading the shared server. Therefore, you would like not worry about any technical responsibilities whatsoever.
Cheap: Shared hosting is cheaper as compared to cloud hosting and other hosting solutions. this is often thanks to the rationale that multiple resources of a physical server are shared amongst users.
Easy to Manage: Shared hosting doesn’t demand much investment, but provides good online presence at an equivalent time.
Disadvantages of Shared Hosting
Number of resources: Websites cannot really serve huge amount of customers, because shared hosting solution has limited number of resources. It cannot really handle sudden traffic spikes or peak times efficiently.
Slow Load Times: If other users are utilizing too many resources on a shared server, it’d hinder the performance of your website and make some time .
Server Downtime: Since a shared server serves multiple requests, it’s going to experience server overload. This successively may cause downtime for your site, or maybe crashing within the end of the day .
Less User Control: Users don’t have much control over features, and that they cannot really choose or scale features as per their requirements. All the users need to share an equivalent features of the shared server as others.
What is Cloud Hosting?
Cloud hosting is preferred by all the corporate giants, but if you’re new to the hosting arena, the first and foremost question popping up in your mind would definitely be – “What is Cloud Hosting”.
Large and small companies use cloud hosting services. For example, Google spreads its resources over hundreds of servers in the cloud, making it reliable and limiting downtime. Google now has its own cloud hosting services division, helping telecommunications, media, retail, software, and more companies modernize their hosting.
Cloud hosting doesn’t limit your website to one server location. Cloud hosting makes applications and websites accessible using cloud resources. Rather in cloud hosting, you get to use a bunch of resources of multiple servers, as and when required.
These storage and computing resources are scattered across multiple virtual machines to stop compute overloads. Cloud hosting is also sometimes referred to as server on-demand hosting, cloud server hosting or cluster server hosting.
Therefore cloud hosting is right for giant websites that always face heavy traffic, because it allows for seamless expansion. And it also prevents server overload by switching you to a different cloud server, just in case if your server gets overwhelmed.
In terms of security and reliability, cloud hosting is best than shared hosting because it imposes various server-level security measures like encryption, key authentication, firewalls, anti-malware systems then on.
However, all of the high-end features of cloud hosting come at a price, so cloud hosting plans are certainly costlier than shared hosting solutions.
Cloud hosting is best for you if:
- You want your website to deliver high performance at peak times and have maximum uptime to take care of productivity, sales and reputation
- You want to only buy the resources you utilize
- You want to scale at large as per the growing requirements of your business
- You want large space for storing
- You don’t want to shop for, manage and maintain hardware infrastructure
Benefits of Cloud Hosting
High performance: Since cloud hosting deploys multiple number of servers, the performance and reliability in such sort of hosting is high. If one server features a problem, your site will simply be switched to a different server to avoid website downtime.
Scalability: Cloud hosting allows you to quickly scale at large; because it allows you to use myriads of resources and only buy those which you employ . Which also means a business can easily serve high traffic spikes, as cloud hosting allows you to feature more resources as per your needs and proportion seamlessly.
Load times: Cloud hosting provider effectively integrates a solid caching mechanism, which is why your site will have faster page load times. And since it doesn’t limit the utilization of resources, other sites won’t affect or hinder together with your website’s page load times.
Storage Space: Cloud hosting provides an enormous amount of space for storing as compared to shared hosting. This feature is greatly beneficial for web professionals who design and build web applications for patrons . Also, large space for storing allows providers to host an outsized number of internet sites at an equivalent time, and manage them efficiently through one instrument panel.
Backup & Recovery: Cloud hosting keeps a backup of your database at different data centers and integrates multiple backup mechanism tools to recover lost data. We’ve seen many businesses suffer and eventually fail thanks to data loss and lack of disaster recovery mechanisms. And that’s why, backup and recovery is one among the simplest highlights of cloud hosting solution.
Cost-Effective: As compared to shared hosting, cloud hosting could also be expensive. But at an equivalent time, cloud hosting saves considerable operational and capital costs, because the IT infrastructure is maintained by cloud hosting providers.
Disadvantages of Cloud hosting
Cost: Thanks to extra features in cloud hosting, users may need to pay a tad bit extra as compared to shared hosting.
Platform Dependency: Users may experience vendor lock-in thanks to being cursed with one cloud hosting vendor and not having the ability to migrate to a different cloud platform. this will be avoided by simply understanding what your cloud provider offers, and checking whether migration to a different platform is straightforward or not.
Less Flexibility: SLA’s and policies of some cloud hosting providers may often restrict users on what they will and can’t do with the hosting service. But the bulk of the cloud hosting providers are quite flexible and don’t impose much restriction.
Thus, we will conclude that cloud hosting doesn’t really have much cons up its sleeve, apart from expensiveness.
Conclusion
Shared hosting is that the traditional method of hosting and may be an honest cost-effective option for several smaller businesses. It can also be easier to use when it involves features.
Cloud hosting is right if you experience high traffic or spikes in visits or if you would like in-depth security measures. Cloud hosting services for e-commerce businesses and businesses with high traffic demands are recommended.
We hope this post about Shared Hosting vs Cloud Hosting has made you understand the most differences between these web hosting solutions. Regardless of what size of business you run, there’s always a perfect solution here which will cater to all or any your cloud hosting needs.
As that one is best for your business, it really comes right down to the sort, requirements and budget of your business. I should recommend choosing Dedicated Cloud Hosting for better performance and scalability.