Cloud Web Hosting

Cloud Web Hosting (also referred to as Grid Web Hosting) is a fairly new technology in web hosting which eliminates the countless limitations of traditional hosting through the use of multiple servers. What this means is that a given website will have the load of its use spread across many machines thus providing greater speed and redundancy.

In a traditional setup, a server crash could be disastrous to a business running a new website. The sites could be down for hours while backups are located, and the server repaired. This could cost an online business thousands of dollars in lost sales/ ad revenue. On a cloud webhosting set-up, a server crash would be detected immediately by the system and the requests for the website would be served by the other servers while the defective one is repaired, providing for near-perfect uptime – critical with today’s demands.

cloud hostingAnother benefit is speed. When a single server runs a website, heavy load during certain times of the day could slow the site to a crawl, causing user frustration. Multiple servers means far greater processing power and consequently greater speed and a better user experience. This will, in turn, increase the likelihood of return visits – necessary for a successful website.

For large companies, cloud hosting enables them to outsource their needs (which they would previously have had to incur themselves) on an equally large third party provider who assumes responsibility for the maintenance of the website, reducing the load of the company’s IT departments. When a company hosts its own site it has to invest in skilled staff to ensure its reliability, a difficult task often riddled with problems due to outages while the tech team scrambles to find an obscure defect in an immensely complex system. Cloud computing passes this difficulty onto a specialized company and, due to the nature of the set-up, other servers continue to run the website while technicians root out the problem in the affected server – a stress free plan for a company.

One other advantage is that cloud computing requires significant financial investment to get started. This makes it prohibitively difficult, from a financial standpoint, for “hurry-come-up” scams to start and rip off businesses. Whereas simpler web hosting plans cost very little to get into, cloud hosting costs several hundred, to several thousand dollars (at the very least), thus weeding out the shady dealers. When we switched to a cloud webhosting provider with our review-website MAG.MA, we went for a “pay-for-what-you-use” deal which meant we paid exactly those resources we actually used. These type of pricing-schemes are becoming more and more available, even with the larger providers.

Though a fairly new concept, cloud web hosting is sure to find greater popularity with webmasters due to its speed, reliability and overall better performance. Companies, and individual webmasters, have already embraced the idea as an improvement on traditional web hosting and one that will expand as necessary alongside the ever-growing internet. Like most technology, it gets cheaper by the year and is already quite affordable to most businesses, making it a very worthwhile upgrade investment.