What is Cloud Hosting and Why to use it

When we decide we want to set up a website for our business, first thing we do is to search for a web hosting provider i.e domain (web address) and  space on the server where we can host our website. Cloud hosting is a more advanced version which we will be explaining in this article.

What is Traditional Web Hosting

This is a way to go if you are not expecting any huge traffic coming to your site. In this kind of hosting the service provider rents you a disk space on one of the server for your website. You can get more details in the previous article on the web hosting that we have explained in detailed. This kind of hosting is also called as Shared Hosting because many websites are sharing the same server. Its advantages are that it is cheap and more simple to use.

What is Cloud Hosting

If want to know the power of Cloud hosting just see the way the websites like Google, Facebook and Twitter behaves, they are never down, and have great performance. And do you remember our own IRCTC website ? No Comments 🙂

Cloud servers pool the bandwidth, storage space, and CPU power of many, many servers so you always have enough power, no matter what applications you’re running or how many people are on your system. Think of it like electricity – always there, whether you need a little or a lot. And just like electricity, you only pay for what you use

Cloud hosting is relying on Cloud computing technologies that allow unlimited number of machines to act as one system. Cloud hosting provides us with server clustering. Instead of using the power of one server, you can access the power of many servers linked together. Other hosting solutions like shared or dedicated depend on one machine only, while cloud hosting security is guaranteed by many servers. Virtually, the processing power is unlimited as you can always add a new server and scale up.

You can shift to cloud hosting when traffic increases or you can start with it but the disadvantage it holds is that the infrastructure behind cloud hosting is a lot more complex than shared hosting, which means more things can go wrong if the host tech’s are not competent (or even if a competent tech makes a mistake). And not to forget the cost which may be charged per hour basics.

Why to use Cloud Hosting

If your website get huge traffic and your customers like performance then there is no reason why you should not go for Cloud Hosting.

•  In Traditional hosting one server is shared by many website. if one among them get high traffic then all other websites can suffer downtime. This problem is solved by multiple servers that come to your rescue in such peak times.
• The content and applications are also mirrored across the cluster to ensure that performance is always maintained at an optimum level no matter what.
• This is more expensive but removes the single point of failure risk as, even if one of the servers breaks down, the rest of the servers keep running and delivering results of visits to the website or application.
• cloud computing servers are scalable, meaning you can add or subtract servers easily.
• You can equip your cloud server with a variety of operating systems and software stacks, including Linux (CentOS, Ubuntu, and Fedora) and Windows

Who should use Cloud Hosting

Well anybody who wishes to use, can use it but we are just saying who it will be more beneficial to

1. Web 2.0 Companies
2. Software as a service companies
3. Hosting Re-sellers Web developers
4. High traffic Sites.
5. Early start-ups.

How to begin with Cloud Hosting

There is currently no automatically move domains into the cloud, so if you are interesting in moving over, you would need to sign-up for cloud hosting, transfer your files and setup your email accounts, update your domain record’s name servers .

Here’s the general process:

• Select service providers according to your budget then Sign up for cloud hosting service.
• Transfer your website’s files via FTP and setup your email accounts from your standard hosting plan on your new cloud account.
• Change your domain record with your registrar after you’ve moved your website’s data to the cloud.
• AFTER you have completed the first three steps, cancel hosting for your old domain 

Pricing for Cloud Hosting vs Traditional Hosting

We can for understanding sake compare the pricing from both the service providers.

For example: Amazon Cloud hosting has both the monthly option and pay-as-you-go. Choosing one is up to you, A Large Instance for Linux/UNIX costs $0.34 per hour. Totaling is easy: 744 hours in a month, multiplied by $0.34 = $252.96/month (approx-Rs 12600)

$252.95 gets you a Quad-Core Xeon, 850GB of storage, 7.5GB of RAM, and zero bottlenecks.

Host Gator’ shared hosting has monthly and yearly payment options at $11.96/month (approx- Rs. 600)

List of Cloud Hosting Service Providers (Top 5 in 2011)

Amazon EC2 – http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

IBM – http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/private-cloud.html

Verizon – http://smallbusiness.verizon.com/default.aspx

Salesforce –http://www.salesforce.com/in/?ir=1

Google App Engine – http://code.google.com/appengine/

Future of Cloud Hosting

Many businesses have made a worthy investment by moving to cloud, while others haven’t yet invested in the infrastructure required to make a transition to cloud. The main reason why cloud computing isn’t as popular as it could have been, is that the cost factor is still a concern for small businesses. For Small Businesses to use cloud cost will have to come down which surely will seeing the trend from last 4-5 years.

Hope one day everybody will be in clouds!

Image source 1,2,3