Cheap Cloud Hosting Overview

Cheap Cloud Hosting with scalable and customizable servers is what every modern-day business enterprise needs. This form of hosting has become very popular in the recent past. The main concept behind cloud computing is similar to “Divide and Rule” – as the resources needed to run your site are spread across multiple web servers, but rendered as per-need basis. Websites can enjoy cloud hosting services on virtual servers, which work by pulling their computing resource from widespread underlying networks of physical servers.

As a utility model of computing, it is a service-based model, not product-based, like traditional utilities like gas and electricity. In general, the client can tap into his or her utility as much as he or she needs, depending on the website’s demands, and paying only for the service used. This significantly reduces chances of downtime during a server malfunction. Additionally, cloud hosting allows users to manage their peak loads much easily without experiencing bandwidth issues, as another server may provide any additional resources. Your website doesn’t have to rely on just a single server, but rather servers grouped together and referred to as “the cloud.”

A real-time example is Google, which has its resources spread across hundreds of severs operating in “the cloud”. This is why Google seldom faced downtimes, especially over the last decade. You will rarely hear that Google is down, and even planned maintenance of Google services, such as AdSense and AdWords, are considered a totally different affair altogether.
Cloud hosting has been largely successful because each of the servers in the cloud assists to perform a certain set of tasks. In case any of the servers fail, one or more other servers temporarily jump in as a backup to help render the needed resources. Similarly, something happens when there is an overload condition. But the usage of poor quality server hardware may hamper the performance.

Types of Cloud Hosting

Enterprise Cloud Hosting

This is Enterprise-level cloud hosting services with quality as the prime focus. Therefore, for high quality enterprise-level cloud services, providers utilize VMware to deliver very reliable cloud services that are better than those offered by dedicated servers.

Cloud Hosting verses Dedicated Servers

When comparing cloud hosting with dedicated servers, the reliability factor presented by the former originates from multiple servers, instead of a single dedicated server, allowing you to handle emergencies without much effort. However, the pricing depends on actual usage – heavy usage may demand higher cost of cloud architecture. Traditional shared hosting and VPS, on the other hand, have extremely low resilience and cost factor. When it comes to VPS, multiple chunks come from a single sever, and a particular user manages each portion. This lowers the capital investment. VPS is most suited for those who are not looking for reliability in cloud computing.

What to Look for in Cheap Cloud Hosting

Simplicity
It should be simple and able to launch in one minute or less. This will allow you to focus your energy on content delivery rather than server setup. With an intuitive user interface, it becomes much easier to control servers, including securing data, creating new servers, and resizing servers, which should take only a few clicks.

Affordability
Since cloud users are only charged for the resources they use, this type of hosting should be affordable. Hosting cost is measured on a per hour basis to offer most control over hosting budgets. In addition, bandwidth pricing should also be affordable. One way of assuring affordability is making sure that sudden traffic spikes are managed to avoid driving the monthly bill up. The public cloud offers the greatest cost saving, as the client’s virtual servers run on physical servers, which they share with other clients.

Scalability

The cloud server should scale with remarkable speed. Expand and reduce within seconds to correspond to demand without spending more money on unnecessary resources. Add new servers or upgrade current offerings through a few clicks without requiring complicated architecture. Virtual servers are super flexible because they are not physical, providing you with all you need at the moment. Spinning up and taking down a server can be done in minutes.

Reliability

Cheap cloud hosting has to be much more reliable than typical shared hosting, where problems with a single account may leak into other websites using the same physical server to cause more problems. With cloud hosting, each server is isolated to ensure that possible stress on a single one has no effect on the performance of another.

Customizable Features

You can easily customize your server. Specify the processing power, operating system, and location when spinning up a cloud-based server. Also configure the server to help present the content of your site in the best possible manner. If you want utmost security, you can create a private cloud on any dedicated hardware, but you must have appropriate security measures in place irrespective of which cloud you select.
Security
Your content must be safe. Since server data is distributed across redundant servers, cloud-hosted information is secured against possible hardware failure. The relevance and safety of server content is ensured using automated backups and snapshots. A hybrid cloud offers the benefits of public as well as public clouds. You may use a public cloud for public-facing components and a private cloud for customer-sensitive data.

Conclusion

Cloud Hosting has been around for years and several large enterprises have enjoyed using this service to help manage their businesses. However, the small business owners have not been much luckier due to the relative price involved. The pricing will have to reduce further for them to enjoy these services. There is hope for this group of entrepreneurs as the pricing has considerably reduced over the last 5 years, and most of them have realized the benefits of cloud hosting, which has forced a number of mid-size businesses to move to the cloud. In fact, many businesses have made significant investments by moving to the cloud, even though some are reluctant to invest in the infrastructure required to shift to do so. The cost factor is still a concern for many small businesses, and this has hampered the transition to the cloud, making cloud computing less popular. Cheap cloud hosting will see more businesses shifting to the cloud in the near future.

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Omri is the Head of Demand Generation, as well as the Lead Author & Editor of the SaaSAddict Blog. Omri established the SaaSAddict blog to create a source for news and discussion about some of the issues, challenges, news, and ideas relating to SaaS and cloud migration.