But is cloud hosting worth it? Is it really a revolution in hosting technology? As a matter of fact, yes, it is! The technology behind cloud hosting allows us to have a cheap, reliable and scalable architecture that also costs a lot less to maintain and consumes far less energy (compared to traditional dedicated servers).
So, how does it work? Well, cloud hosting is very similar to shared hosting (which, incidentally always was and still is the most popular type of hosting among users and providers alike), only instead of using one, it uses multiple physical machines to host the data.
If on shared hosting, 20 user accounts are hosted on one physical server, then on cloud hosting, any amount of virtual hosting accounts AND virtual servers are hosted on hundreds or more physical machines, interconnected to work as one. This opens a lot of new possibilities in hosting. Below are 5 reasons why cloud hosting is better than traditional dedicated, VPS and shared hosting technologies.
No dependence on hardware: When you host something on a cloud, you don’t depend on the hardware. You don’t have to worry that you’ll run out of RAM, hard drive space or processor power, because if you do, you can easily add more, in a few seconds. A datacenter usually has thousands of servers with thousands of Gigabytes of RAM, hard drive memory and processor cores. And if they’re interconnected in a cloud, nothing stops the hosting company from adding more resources to the sites or virtual machines that need them.
Increased Reliability: Cloud hosting can be more reliable than any existing technology because everything is virtualized. Everything can be easily stored in multiple copies in the cloud, so if a few machines go down, the rest take over the work and no data or performance is lost. It’s like a massive RAID array, only for all the resources, not only hard drives.
Infinite Scalability: Ease of practically infinite scalability is one of the major advantages of cloud hosting. Because everything is virtualized, you can add, swap and remove memory, hard drives or processors without interrupting the work of any site and without losing any data. You can add a few dozen new servers to the cloud, power them up and the cloud will seamlessly integrate and put them to work. No downtime, no performance or data loss, no problems, only more power and speed.
Infinite Performance: On a usual dedicated server, the resources are almost always used below 60%, and it practically never runs at full capacity. This is just a waste of energy and processing power. Shared hosting are much more efficient in this because they allocate resources to sites on a per need basis. So, if a site is idling and another one is receiving heavy traffic from a social network (being Slashdotted, as they say), the system takes all the free resources (RAM, processor time, hard drive space) from the idle sites and routes them the loaded one. That’s why physical machines running shared hosting are almost always fully loaded and still manage to show a very good performance for all the sites hosted. VPS servers act like shared ones, but they have a drawback that makes them less efficient: they allocate a guaranteed amount of resources to each client that can never be rerouted to others, which leads to free resources for one client, while another is overloaded, just like a dedicated server. Still, shared hosting has an obvious major disadvantage: it’s only one physical machine. If more sites are hit by heavy traffic at once, the machine will be overloaded and unresponsive for all the sites. This is where cloud hosting shines: it has a much bigger pool of resources which it can allocate dynamically and practically instantly between all sites. And if the current pool of physical machines is not enough, the datacenter can always quickly (less than half an hour!) add more.
Resource and Energy Efficiency: While modern processors have power saving modes, most of other components don’t, so they use the same amount of energy whether loaded or idle. This is why it’s more cost effective and “green” to have them fully loaded at all times. A fully loaded cloud of 1000 machines can replace 5,000 or more dedicated servers loaded at only 50-60%, which is a lot of saved electricity and money.
As you can see, cloud hosting is quite a bit better than traditional dedicated servers, VPS and shared hosting. Experts predict that in the future, only cloud hosting will exist, because with all these advantages, datacenters and hosting companies won’t have a reason to opt for any other technology.
