Who Needs Cloud Hosting?

Every company needs a web site and web hosting service, and many individuals do as well. The question is, what type of web hosting do we need?

Cloud hosting allows you to draw resources from a virtualized group of connected servers, rather than from a single physical server. As a result, you get access to a dynamically accessible service that is highly scalable. Not everybody needs it. If you have a small web site without much traffic, and don’t expect dramatic growth any time soon, the shared hosting model will work fine for you. While the shared hosting environment does present you with a finite amount of bandwidth and disk space, and limit you to the power of a single physical machine, in reality it’s not likely that a small business will reach that capacity given the large capacity of most servers.

However, cloud hosting relies on virtualization technology to give you access to multiple servers instead of just one, totally eliminating any limitation and giving you an unlimited supply of processing power, bandwidth and disk space. In most cases, a cloud hosting provider will allow you to scale both up and down dynamically, depending on your needs, which means you can use as many or as few resources as required.

What happens when your small web site suddenly becomes incredibly popular? Or, what about web sites that have seasonal spikes in traffic? If you run a soccer web site, you may have a relatively even flow of traffic until the World Cup, and then traffic to your web site may well exceed the capacity of the single shared server upon which it lives. Web site operators that have sites that are subject to such dramatic spikes in traffic would benefit well from a cloud hosting environment. So too would operators that expect dramatic growth. There is nothing more dangerous to a business than growing faster than your infrastructure. Rapid growth and popularity is good, but when your web server cannot keep up with the increase in traffic, that’s just bad customer service—and you risk losing visitors for good if they log on one day and find that your server is slow or they can’t access your site.