Cloud hosting Vs Traditional Hosting

Just like in any other industries in the world, hosting companies are looking for more effective and simple ways to provide their services, and the cloud is the best answer to all their problems.

You see, with the ever increasing need for more processing power for the virtual world, the providers can’t keep up the pace in the real one. Whereas you can relatively easily launch a site that will be viewed by millions in as short as a few days (best case scenario, of course), the data center that hosts it can’t just pull out more resources out of nowhere.

So, there was a tendency of many data centers to be overloaded, causing a lot of sites to be loading slower and data to be lost. But engineers noted that the overload wasn’t even across all resources, and some machines had more free resources or even idling, while others were working at 100% all the time.

That is because of the traditional hosting methods, where people buy dedicated servers for their own use, and only their own use. They do not share their machines with anyone, and if their site is not popular or they just keep it for testing purposes, it mostly sits idle. Meanwhile, other servers in the data center are overloaded and need to be upgraded, which is very expensive, plus it leads to site downtime. This wouldn’t be a problem if space and energy were unlimited, but unfortunately, they aren’t.

Virtual Private Servers and Shared hosting remedied this problem for a while by allowing multiple users and their sites to be located on the same physical machines, but they still weren’t robust and dynamic enough to support the current growth. And that’s where cloud hosting comes in.

A cloud is basically a cluster of hundreds, thousands or even more physical machines that are combined to form one big and powerful virtual machine, with all the resources fully shared (that’s thousands of GigaHertz and MB of RAM and Petabytes of storage). Inside that machine, a hosting company can have anything its clients want, from dedicated servers (which are just the resources that would normally form a server allocated for a single user) to simple user accounts for those who just need a site hosted and don’t need access to developer tools or a separate OS environment.