Cloud Hosting Vs. Traditional Hosting Today, when budgets are tight and competition is fierce, looking for efficient and affordable ways to accommodate your web hosting needs is a must for businesses of all shapes and sizes. If you are in the process of establishing a new website or you are simply looking to improve the way that yours currently operates, you’re likely wondering if you are better off with traditional web hosting methods, or if cloud hosting might be a preferable alternative. Let’s find out!
What does traditional hosting look like?
Traditional hosting refers to two forms: dedicated and shared.
- Dedicated hosting means that you for all of the resources for one or more servers from a single provider with set CPU and RAM, etc., and total control – which is more expensive, though offers greater security and overall performance.
- Shared (as the name suggests) is more common in smaller businesses where they share resources on a single server with multiple businesses / websites – which is invariably cheaper and relatively low maintenance.
- While traditional hosting certainly has its benefits, it’s not without drawbacks:
- Sharing resources on a single server can lead to decreased performance during heavy traffic spikes, etc.
- Security breaches on other websites can negatively impact you as well.
- If the server itself faces issues, all of the connected websites fail.
Traditional shared hosting is handy in the short-term, but as your business scales and your traffic grows, you’ll need a far more reliable alternative.
How is Cloud Hosting Vs. Traditional Hosting different?
Cloud hosting is superior to traditional hosting in a number of ways – namely the fact that it is scalable in a way that traditional hosting simply cannot compete with. The best cloud servers in Australia offer virtual space on demand and as needed, allowing businesses to pay for precisely what they use (as opposed to paying for a set amount up-front).
Further to that, cloud hosting balances the load out between a multitude of cloud server clusters. All information and applications are essentially ‘mirrored’ across the entire network, thus enabling websites to remain live (with no downtime or lost data) – even if a server goes down.
Another great benefit is that your IT department will not need to invest in any expensive server hardware or pay up-front for large storage packages you might not use. With the cloud, everything is hosted remotely and you can scale up and down with great flexibility as and when your needs change.
Conclusion
Particularly if you are looking to invest heavily in your digital marketing and scale your online presence, switching to cloud based hosting and computing can yield a number of significant benefits – not to mention the cost saving implications.
Of course, don’t write traditional hosting off entirely if you are a new business with a simple website that doesn’t see much in the way of traffic. However, as mentioned above, cloud hosting can provide excellent flexibility, and since you only need to pay for what you are using, it typically ends up far cheaper and easier.
Not only that, but if you start with the cloud, you don’t have to worry about the inevitable future. “Start as you mean to go on”, as they say.
