Starting a new blog or launching a new website for your small business? Choosing a hosting service that suits your needs is essential for your site’s success. While web hosting can be cost-effective for low-traffic websites, cloud hosting offers reliability, flexibility, and scalability to support your business as it grows. Wondering which is right for your website needs? We’ll break it down for you.
What is web hosting?
Web hosting is the traditional method for storing website data. Also known as “shared hosting,” web hosting operates via one large server that is shared among your website and the websites of your provider’s other clients. While cloud hosting operates on multiple servers via the cloud, web hosting is more “physical” – as a web hosting customer, you are essentially purchasing part of a physical server. Because it is shared, web hosting is generally more affordable than cloud hosting.
However, it has its downsides. Web hosting provides less consistent and less reliable performance. Because your website is operating under one server, if that server fails or you experience an unusually high amount of traffic, chances are, your site will go down or users will experience slow response times. Web hosting can be a solid option for low-traffic sites or for users who are new to website development, as it can be more user-friendly. However, web hosting is generally more unreliable than cloud hosting.
What is cloud hosting?
Unlike web hosting, cloud hosting doesn’t operate on fixed hardware, but rather, works on a cloud system of servers around the world that work together as one machine. The number of servers used by your site is infinitely scalable and can be increased or decreased depending on need. If your site experiences higher traffic, you can take advantage of more servers so your website will continue to run smoothly, unlike operating on an unscalable, fixed-server web hosting service, where increased site traffic equals decreased performance.
Increased redundancy in cloud hosting means improved reliability. If one server fails, the slack will be “picked up” by other servers, meaning your website can stay up and running, regardless of server failures. Cloud hosting provides guaranteed service with minimal downtime, for an improved user experience. The high security measures put in place by cloud hosting providers create a safer environment for you to operate on.
Which one is right for you?
While web hosting is useful for smaller websites, such as a personal blog, where speed is not a top priority, it falls short when it comes to handling business or ecommerce websites – or sites that frequently experience heavy traffic. For those serious about growth and reliability, cloud hosting is critical. ALTERNcloud provides affordable, reliable cloud hosting solutions that ensure your website runs smoothly.
ALTERNcloud’s EZ Cloud Starter
Start developing and deploying apps with ease with ALTERNcloud’s EZ Cloud Starter. Kick off your plan by selecting the size of Cloud you need, and once it’s initiated, only get charged for the compute resources you create and use. With a multi-tenant configuration, ALTERNcloud’s EZ Cloud provides customers with a fully virtualized environment and one-click simplified provisioning.
Featuring shared and dedicated CPUs and GPUs, an extensive compute templates library, and a Cloud core managed by ALTERNcloud, EZ Cloud grants users advanced self-service versatility and is easily upgradable. EZ Cloud Starter includes three floating IP addresses, five compute instances, 40GB of memory, and 500GB of volume block storage.