A Month in the Cloud: Time to Assess the Cloud, Could Web Hosting, and What It All Means to You

One of the latest buzzwords in the ecommerce world is the “cloud”. From cloud computing to cloud hosting, the word “cloud” seems to be everywhere. Unfortunately, not many people seem to truly understand the nature of the “cloud” or what it really is. In fact, when a study was conducted to see exactly how many people really understood the nature of the word, only 19 percent of those over the age of 30 truly grasped what the cloud really was. Even fewer understood how it related to their website hosting needs. At Alertra, we believe that anything affecting your site and its uptime and reliability is something that is worth looking into and learning about. This month we will be spending April “in the cloud” so you can understand what the cloud really is, what cloud web hosting is, and how this all relates to you.

What Is Cloud Website Hosting?

With traditional website hosting, such as hosting on a shared server, your site is hosted on a single server located in a single location. Cloud hosting, on the other hand, uses the resources of multiple clustered servers. What this means is that instead of using the resources of only one server, your site uses the resources of several severs in order to accommodate the needs of your site. While the servers are indeed in the physical world, the environment created by the cluster of servers is what is referred to as the cloud.

Can You Benefit from Cloud Website Hosting?

If your site is putting a strain on the resources provided by your shared hosting server due to the fact that it has outgrown your shared server’s resources, you may benefit from cloud website hosting. This type of hosting is best suited to popular sites that drive a lot of traffic and use significant server resources. While dedicated server hosting is an option, this type of hosting usually requires a bit of IT knowledge, is often expensive, and if the server your site his hosted on goes down, your website goes down with it. With cloud website hosting, however, you can benefit from the advantages of dedicated hosting without encountering the drawbacks.

The bottom line is, if your company has outgrown its shared hosting plan and you have been considering a dedicated server for your hosting needs, you may want to consider cloud website hosting as another option.

What You Need to Know About Cloud Website Hosting

First and foremost, cloud website hosting is scalable. For example, if your website suddenly becomes very busy, your site can gather more of the cloud’s resources to help support that growth. If that spike in traffic declines, those gathered resources can then be released and you can run your site using only the resources you need. This on-demand resource availability helps you keep your site up and running and also helps you save money, ensuring you only pay for the resources you actually use.

Of course, this is a very brief overview of cloud website hosting. There is more to consider before you can decide whether or not cloud hosting is right for you. You may understand how cloud hosting works now, but you may still not fully understand the inner workings of the cloud. Next week we will be discussing the basics of the cloud in more detail so you can better understand how cloud hosting fits into the essence of the cloud.