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Web hosting and cloud hosting are two methods for hosting our websites on servers and making them accessible to the entire world. Every website is hosted on localhost by default; therefore, we need to upload our file to a server to make it accessible to everyone on the internet. Hosting’s job is to provide you with an opportunity to store your data; however, web hosting and cloud hosting do this job differently. This post looks further into web hosting vs cloud hosting and their pros and cons.
Overview of Web Hosting
Web Hosting is a service that gives you a presence on the internet. When you wish to establish a website, you'll need to rent a server or a location to store all of your site's files. This can also be thought of as a location where your web site's files are linked to the internet. Your hosting provider will also give you other services, such as domain name and e-mail address registration, but this is just the technical element. Hosting firms usually have many servers in different data centres (companies that specialise in storing computer hardware), so if one of them goes down for some reason, it won't be a problem. However, all of them will use the same software and provide you access to the same files and directories. The objective of web hosting is to provide your website files at home and make them available to anyone who wants to visit it.
Types of Web Hosting
- Shared hosting: Multiple websites are hosted on the same machine or server under this sort of hosting. This method is best for newcomers and small websites.
- Dedicated Hosting: In dedicated hosting, an enterprise has its own dedicated data centres for its websites. Large enterprises with a server administrator should use this type of website hosting. It enhances the functionality of your website and gives you more control over it.
- VPS Hosting: VPS hosting is similar to shared hosting, except that the files are stored in a private space with their own set of resources. It brings together the best features and maintains a balance between shared and dedicated hosting.
- Cloud Hosting: This is a relatively new option that utilises resource and scope sharing to reduce costs and the likelihood of visible service outages. When compared to other solutions, it may be more cost-effective.
Overview of Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is a type of web hosting where the websites are hosted on virtual servers on a cloud. Cloud hosting is a type of server and network infrastructure that divides a physical server into several virtual servers using the software. Solutions aren't deployed on a single server, unlike dedicated hosting. Instead, the website instances are hosted on multiple virtual machines, which enhances the scalability and efficiency of the website when the visitors' count goes high. The most basic definition of cloud hosting is a network of virtual servers that connect to an entire server network. Cloud hosting is a cloud delivery strategy that provides a set of remote/virtual services called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Advantages of Cloud Hosting
- Availability is high.
- The scalability of server resources is simple.
- It is less expensive than dedicated hardware.
- Setup and migration are simple.
Is a Web Server the same as a Cloud Hosting?
A web server is a physical device such as a computer that stores website files so they are available online and presents them to the people who visit your website, while cloud hosting is a service provided by a company that makes websites accessible over the internet.
Key Differences Between Cloud and Traditional Web Hosting
Cloud hosting and traditional web hosting are two different types of hosting websites and each of them has pros and cons. Here are the key differences between them:
Performance
The performance of a website depends on the server and how fast it can process data. Cloud hosting’s performance can be superior due to the distributed nature of the resources, while traditional hosting may be limited by the physical resources of the server. Therefore, Cloud Hosting is the best option for websites that need to process large traffic. Moreover, it can offer a more enjoyable and better user experience, since it is always consistent and able to handle large amounts of traffic.
As you can guess, traditional hosting has a hard time dealing with huge traffic and it is recommended to be used by small businesses which do not need to process huge data.
Scaling & flexibility
While using Cloud hosting, you may scale your resources vertically or horizontally without a lot of effort in cloud hosting when the traffic on the servers increases. This necessitates either a plan update or a switch to a different provider in traditional web hosting. As a result, Cloud hosting offers more scalability and flexibility by allowing resources to be increased or decreased as needed. Most of the Cloud providers also have an option called Autoscaling services which is important when traffic unexpectedly goes through a drastic change.
However, traditional hosting offers little flexibility, since it is challenging to scale physical servers.
Reliability
Cloud Hosting has higher reliability due to redundancy and the ability to failover to other servers in the network. However, the reliability of traditional Web Hosting depends on the single server or limited servers being used. In this type of hosting, the site works with the help of a physical server which can limit the reliability of the host. In contrast, cloud hosting has unlimited resources which leads to experiencing less downtime. As a result, if one of the servers faces a problem, it is going to be replaced by another.
Resource allocation
Cloud Hosting utilises a network of servers that pull resources from an underlying network of physical servers. Traditional Web Hosting relies on a single physical server or a group of physical servers with fixed resources. So it may offer more resources, but they are not dynamic. In contrast, you can adjust resources, CPU, and memory with Cloud hosting.
Architecture
Due to the unique architecture of Cloud hosting, resources can be dynamically allocated and scaled across multiple servers in real time, providing flexibility to handle varying loads and ensuring high availability. Whereas, traditional web hosting typically involves a single physical server that hosts one or multiple websites. The resources are fixed and directly tied to the physical server's capacity and to scale it up, you require adding more hardware or upgrading the server.
Control
Cloud hosting provides more control over the resources as there are multiple servers hosting your websites, and you can control the number of instances, scaling factors, etc. You also do not need to have shared resources with other websites which
Security
Cloud provides more security, advanced monitoring systems, and automated security features than traditional web hosting. If a cyber-attack happens in Cloud Hosting, your data is secure. Mainly because data is stored in different interconnected servers and there are different backups of it. Whereas, in traditional Hosting, there is a high possibility of losing all data and experiencing downtime.
Cost
In traditional web hosting, you pay for fixed resources, while in cloud hosting, you pay for what you use, which most enterprises prefer. As traffic increases in Cloud Hosting, the scaling enables you to allocate different resources; however, with Traditional Hosting you need to upgrade your plan or buy additional equipment.
Conclusion
We looked through the definition of hosting and how cloud hosting and web hosting differ from one another in this article. We can see that cloud hosting is a sort of web hosting in which we leverage cloud resources to make our websites more scalable and efficient. In contrast, web hosting is the process of uploading files to virtual servers and making them available to all internet users.
I'm fascinated by the IT world and how the 1's and 0's work. While I venture into the world of Technology, I try to share what I know in the simplest way with you. Not a fan of coffee, a travel addict, and a self-accredited 'master chef'.