The legacy business system started fading on the existence of web hosting. The marketers and business magnates started building and hosting their websites. The websites considerably increased the revenue of a business. Hosting websites made it easier for marketers and industrialists to reach the audience without age, gender, and demographic barriers. Web hosting made things effortless for businesses in terms of production, finance, storage, warehousing, recruitments, logistics, etc.
Once you are ready with a website, it is essential to know which hosting type to opt for from shared, VPS, dedicated, unmanaged or managed cloud hosting, etc.
Let us have a look at each type.
Shared web hosting goes well with small websites with minimal traffic rate. It is also cost-efficient and easy to manage. Most businesses opt for shared hosting in which the website shares resources of physical servers. The cost of this hosting type is less because of distributed resources.
VPS works on virtualization. The server is shared between websites but, each user has a dedicated IP allocated. It is good to go with VPS if you need scalability. VPS is said to be a better version of shared hosting, though both the hosting types have uniqueness.
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But what if you have a vast business empire?
Shared and VPS wouldn’t be convenient if you have massive business data and a vast user base. The data and the number of users visiting the website will require huge server space and resources. If you opt for shared or VPS, there are chances of mishaps happening.
As every problem comes with a solution, the solution to the above issue is either cloud hosting or dedicated web hosting.
Let us understand cloud hosting and dedicated hosting one by one.
The gist of cloud hosting.
Numerous connected physical servers make a single cloud. A dedicated server cluster builds a cloud where resources are shared through virtualization. Cloud is not something built on a single server. In cloud hosting, the data is over multiple servers rather than just one server. Cloud hosting accesses the processing capacity and resources of numerous machines while dedicated servers do not.
Working of cloud-based server hosting
Cloud hosting uses computing technology that distributes data amongst various servers located in different areas. There are different types of cloud hosting, namely public, private, hybrid and managed. Cloud hosting provides elastic scalability and security which, dedicated servers fail to give. Cloud VPS plans include pay as you go in which the user only pays for resources he has utilized, unlike in dedicated the user has to pay the plan amount even if he is not using most resources. The elastic cloud platform deals with managing virtual servers, caching web pages, synchronizing webpages, etc.
The platform you are developing a website on doesn’t matter when you are hosting through the cloud. Cloud platform enables hosting sites built on any CMS, programming language, or OS.
What makes cloud and dedicated hosting different?
Cloud hosting is optimum for small and enterprise-level businesses, but dedicated hosting is better for websites with a larger traffic rate. Comparatively, cloud hosting is cost-efficient than dedicated hosting.
The hardware resources provided by the dedicated server enable developers to install programming language extension, third party frameworks, utilities, tools, etc. In dedicated hosting, the web server is all yours. In cloud hosting, the webpages are distributed on virtual servers.
Cloud hosting advantages
Cloud hosting furnishes pre-installed elastic web servers supporter that allows CMS websites to run on a LAMP stack. The hosting plans provided by cloud hosting to CMS websites include more RAM, CPU and I/O processes than shared hosting.
Cloud hosting disadvantages
The system administrator or web developer does have the liberty to modify the web server stack software installation to build a custom solution.
Working of dedicated server hosting.
While you buy a dedicated web hosting plan, you owe the entire server. The resources are not shared with other websites in dedicated hosting. You are the only client using the server resources. The client has the liberty to customize resources. The resources include RAM, bandwidth, processor, etc.
Dedicated hosting advantages
The user gets full control over the server which makes the server customizable in all ways. A user can install software of his choice. The level of security is higher in dedicated hosting as no other website resides in your server space. Customer support is remarkable. India’s well-known web hosting company MilesWeb is best known for its dedicated hosting plans at cheaper rates and 24*7 customer service.
Dedicated hosting disadvantages
Hosting a website using a dedicated web hosting plan requires sufficient technical knowledge. Managed dedicated hosting is not cost-effective in this case.
Points to remember before selecting the right server for your business
Dedicated server hosting was used on a larger scale traditionally but, cloud computing made things easier with virtualization.
Pay as you go approach is efficient than fixed billing cycle for many reasons.
Small businesses can now host websites on retail PaaS cloud hosting plans at a cheaper cost than dedicated hosting.
Reference: https://www.statista.com/statistics/500551/worldwide-dedicated-hosting-market-size/
Reference: https://www.statista.com/statistics/500541/worldwide-hosting-and-cloud-computing-market/
Conclusion: From the above statics, it is clear that the cloud hosting market flourished rapidly in a decade, making an annual turnover of 156.4 billion$, whereas the dedicated hosting market made progress by making an annual turnover of 6.53 billion$. But, ‘one size fits all’ cannot be a solution in the cloud vs. dedicated hosting services. As the infrastructure and working of an organization changes, the decision to opt for one of the hosting services changes.
