What is Cloud Hosting?

With the number of webhosting options growing everyday, many people who are looking to start their own online business not only holds all the information that’s required, but is more robust and less likely to go down if the server goes offline.

Fortunately, there is a new type of webhosting available that solves many of these potential problems and it is known as cloud hosting or cloud computing.

Advantages over traditional hosting

Cloud hosting is basically your online website being carried by series or cluster of load-balancing servers rather than just one. The advantages of cloud hosting or cloud computing are numerous over traditional webhosting.

Cloud computing means that instead of a single server, your website is being supported by a number of servers linked together. The main advantage to this type of setup is that if one server or piece of equipment should fail, the website will not necessarily go offline.

What if server goes down?

One of the biggest problems facing small and large online businesses today is that a server going down will not only take their website off the internet, it may be minutes, hours or even days depending on how often it is checked before you realize it has gone down.

While most servers go back online in a short period of time, if it happens frequently enough your online business may foster a reputation of unreliability.

After all, if your website keeps going down and you apparently are doing nothing about it, then obviously you don’t care much about your customers.

But cloud hosting helps to solve that problem by utilizing several servers so in case one does go down your website will stay online, serving customers without noticeable problems depending on the severity of the down server. But even being partially up is better than not having your website online at all.

But in most cases a disruption of one server, whether it was a brief power outage or a natural disaster will not disrupt the functions of your website as it is spread among several servers located in different areas, so even a natural disaster that wipes out one of the servers will not affect the others.

Different charge fee policy

Another advantage of cloud hosting is that the charges are usually not a single fee like most webhosting companies from a single server, but a variable rate depending on how much of the resources are being used. This rate is often less than a fixed fee with upfront hardware charges typically used by many webhosting companies.

Cloud hosting allows you to avoid that and it works especially well for online sites that do not have tremendous information needs, which is to say most websites.

Privacy is also spread out

If there is a downside, cloud hosting does not have the privacy or security advantages of single server websites as the information is spread out over several.

For those with great privacy or security concerns, you will want to take into consideration that the information stored is on several servers instead of just one, making it somewhat more vulnerable to successful hacking, but for most online businesses this is not much of a greater concern.

I’d like to hear your experiences with web hosting. Have you heard about cloud hosting? What is your favorite hosting company? Oh don’t forget to leave your comment below.