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Shared hosting vs Cloud hosting

Shared hosting is the most affordable type of hosting but its features are quite limited. It was called ‘shared’ because you basically ‘share’ the server with hundreds of users. The server is divided into several similar hosting accounts that are owned by different users. These accounts can have different limits such as number of domains and FTP users, disk space etc.

Lots of users might think that a small shared hosting package would be enough for their website. However, Shared hosting has one significant disadvantage - it was not designed for high traffic. In case the traffic increases, most likely, your website will start either to load very slowly, or become unavailable for certain users.

Unlike Shared hosting, Cloud-based hosting is highly scalable, meaning your site can grow over time, using as much resources as it requires and you only pay for what you need. It does not have limits as a cloud consists of several physical servers. If one of them gets overloaded, the load is transferred to another server. So, Cloud hosting is not only more stable than Shared hosting, but also more secure, especially in case of a DDoS-attack. It is a bit more expensive in comparison to Shared but it’s totally worth the price.

VPS vs Cloud hosting

VPS is a virtual private server (or virtual dedicated server). It is a more powerful platform for hosting websites than Shared hosting. Though, it is somehow similar to Shared hosting: a physical server is divided into several virtual servers. Nonetheless, these virtual servers have their own dedicated resources such as RAM, CPU and bandwidth. So, your website will not go down because of the ‘neighbour’ is using lots of server resources. Moreover, you have the opportunity to install your own OS and other software, configure and customize it.

Server load may be higher in the evening and lower at daytime. With Cloud hosting this issue may be resolved very easily: you simply can change the pricing plan (manually or automatically) as Cloud hosting supports hourly billing cycles. So, if the traffic is low, you can switch to the cheapest bandwidth rate and when the number of visitors increases you can adjust accordingly.

Another important point is that VPS servers are scalable, however, they still have some limits. For instance, you can get a maximum of 32 Gb RAM for your server. Cloud-based VPS are scalable and you can add as much resources as needed regardless of the physical server characteristics.

Dedicated server vs Cloud hosting

A Dedicated server is a physical server rented by you. You can use all of its resources on your own, without any ‘neighbours’. Cloud hosting makes the existence of a dedicated server meaningless - there is no reason to purchase it, if a Cloud VPS can adjust to traffic or load increase in a matter of seconds. Moreover, it will be less costly than a Dedicated server and, of course, more scalable.

Conclusions

Cloud hosting is definitely more advantageous than all other hosting types. But keep in mind that the more resources you use, the more will you pay. Also, it is very hard to calculate the amount of resources that your website will use in the next month and thus, to estimate the approximate amount of money required to cover the expenses.

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