What is Cloud Hosting and How Can it Benefit Your Site?
Read this post to learn how cloud hosting is different from traditional hosting and why it's a great option to consider.
- May 11, 2022
Everyone’s heard of cloud hosting at this point, but plenty of industry terms get thrown around without being clearly defined for people outside those industries and this is one of them. Even if you have some idea of what it means, you might not know why it matters. If you have a website live, then you already have hosting in place. Isn’t that enough? Why should you commit time, effort and money to make a change?
In truth, whether you make the shift next week, next month, or next year, it’s inevitable that you’ll eventually pivot to cloud hosting. It’s just the way the industry is going. But what we need to address in this piece is why you should make it a priority, because yes, you should take your site in that direction sooner rather than later.
Let’s start by covering what cloud hosting is (explaining how it relates to conventional hosting), then move on to how it can help your site. Here we go:
How is cloud hosting different from traditional hosting?
As noted, you must already have hosting in place to have a site live, but it’s presumably traditional hosting — so what does that involve? Well, there are two types of hosting that fit that definition:
- Dedicated hosting involves paying a service provider for the entire resources of one or more servers. You’ll have dedicated bandwidth and total control over each server’s resources. This will come at a cost, but provide you with rich customisation options.
- Shared hosting involves purchasing a specific quantity of storage on a single server that is shared by other users. Being simple and relatively cheap, this is the most prevalent option amongst small or medium-sized business websites.
Either way, you’re paying a hosting provider to grant you space and resources. Cloud hosting is no different in this regard; what makes it distinct is its detachment from specific servers. You pay for storage space, performance and security, and it’s ultimately provided through virtual servers, with the underlying hardware spread globally across server farms.
This might not sound noteworthy, but this approach affords some notable advantages over conventional hosting. With the data scattered across virtual servers (with complex backup systems in place, it bears noting), you needn’t fear the failure of a given piece of hardware. Whenever necessary, your data can simply be shunted between systems, ensuring that you notice no change to accessibility or performance.
And though big businesses are often tempted to cling to their private hosting solutions (having invested heavily in infrastructure to make them work), there isn’t even a performance benefit to this stubbornness. Atlassian Cloud offers tremendous speeds, making it perfect for an easy transition from the old way of doing things.
Why is cloud hosting a great option to consider?
Despite being relatively new (and thus somewhat intimidating), cloud hosting is already popular because it addresses so many of the issues with traditional hosting. There’s no disputing that it’s often far cheaper, but let’s look at some of the other benefits:
- Reduced downtime. If your website goes down on a frequent basis, it’ll inevitably impact your success by interrupting conversions and souring people on the reliability of your service. Cloud hosting is innately resistant to disruption due to its use of servers spread throughout the world. If one server fails, the system can simply fall back to the next with minimal impact on performance.
- Worldwide flexibility. Relying on a fixed-location server will limit your website’s global performance, with prospective customers on the other side of the world likely to encounter slow load speeds. Because cloud hosting providers use servers throughout the world (some even provide integrated no-extra-cost CDN support, like Cloudways with Cloudflare), you don’t need to worry about this. No matter where your visitors are based, you can deliver great performance.
- Greater scalability. The ability to rapidly and variably scale your website is another benefit of cloud hosting. This sort of hosting allows you to assign resources manually or based on your website’s demands, allowing you to effortlessly scale up or down to keep costs minimal without compromising speed or reliability.
The biggest point of intimidation is in migrating your website, as migrations can be slow and frustrating, but this shouldn’t hold you back. Modern migrations tend to be straightforward, and many hosting providers such as the aforementioned Cloudways will freely handle them for new customers.
The sooner you make the move, the sooner you’ll enjoy better speeds, stronger security, and improved reliability. And if you’re going to do it eventually, why not now when you can better take advantage of it? Make it a priority. You won’t regret it.
Keeping up with current technologies isn’t easy if you’re not invested in the tech world, but it’s worthwhile. By investing in cloud hosting, you can ensure your website is fast, secure, and ready to scale.
Here at Clearvision, we provide cloud hosting and migrations for Atlassian users. If you’re going to let anyone help with your cloud hosting needs, let it be our ISO 27001 and Amazon Web Services (AWS) certified experts.
Guest Contributor
Rodney Laws
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