What is cloud hosting?
Overview
Cloud hosting involves storing and running your web application on the cloud, which is a network of physical and virtual resources spread across diverse geographic locations. Unlike traditional hosting with limited resources and fixed locations, cloud hosting uses scalable computing resources delivered through virtual servers on distributed physical machines. The ability to scale up or down combined with the pay-as-you-go costing model makes cloud hosting popular and cost-efficient for any kind of web application. Additionally, the control over resource provisioning and enhanced tolerance to usage spikes make this model highly reliable for businesses and organizations.
Types of Cloud Hosting
Depending upon the mode of administration, control, responsibility, and deployment, there are four types of cloud hostings:
- Public cloud: The third-party cloud provider manages the underlying hardware, computing resources, maintenance, and availability and provides subscription plans to deliver their services. The operational responsibilities, like provisioning, configuring, scaling, etc., typically reside with you.
- Private cloud: You will create, deploy, manage, and use the cloud infrastructure and resources for your organizational requirements. Since the entire responsibility resides with you, this is also called an in-house or corporate cloud.
- Hybrid cloud: This cloud infrastructure incorporates both public and private cloud resources to form a hybrid solution for your hosting and computational requirements. The third-party managed and private components are typically unified through a centralized administrative interface to facilitate seamless integration of services.
- Managed cloud: This type of cloud hosting relieves you from all the administrative tasks, including monitoring, security, backup, upgrades, configuration, provisioning, and scaling. While the experienced and skillful third-party provider undertakes all these responsibilities, you can focus on your application and business functionality.
What is Web Hosting?
Overview
Traditional web hosting is a service that offers a hosting server consisting of several software application servers and a file system to host your web application. It also offers limited or unlimited bandwidth, the amount of data transferred between the hosting server and the visitors’ browsers or client applications. Depending upon your purchased subscription plan, your application will reside on its server, accessible to the general public.
Types of Web Hosting
Depending upon the models of deployment, management, and virtualization, there are four types of web hosting:
- Shared web hosting: The most budget-friendly option, shared hosting places multiple websites on a single server, requiring them to share resources like CPU, RAM, Storage, and bandwidth. This keeps costs low but also means your website’s performance can be impacted by other users on the server. While the hosting provider manages the server and resource allocation, individual websites have limited scalability due to this shared environment.
- Dedicated web hosting: Dedicated web hosting offers unparalleled performance and complete resource control for your web application. Each application resides on a dedicated server, eliminating the resource-sharing and scalability limitations inherent to shared hosting. This exclusivity translates to faster response times, enhanced security, and the ability to tailor the server environment to your specific requirements. However, the trade-offs include higher costs associated with leasing an entire server and the responsibility for managing the server infrastructure yourself.
- Managed web hosting: Managed web hosting relieves organizations of server management burdens. Skilled providers handle resource allocation, security, backups, and upgrades, ensuring seamless server operation. They further optimize the server environment to your application’s specific needs, allowing you to focus on core development and functionality. Cost-effective shared servers are ideal for basic plans, while higher-tier dedicated options offer granular control and scalability for demanding applications.
- Virtual Private Server: VPS hosting leverages virtualization technology to partition a single physical server into several isolated virtual environments. Each virtual server provides a dedicated space for a web application, featuring its share of system resources like CPU, RAM, and storage. While these resources are physically shared across the host server, virtualization ensures logical separation, guaranteeing consistent performance and security for each application. Compared to shared hosting, VPS offers significant advantages. Each application receives a pre-allocated portion of resources, eliminating the performance fluctuations common in shared environments. Additionally, scaling becomes more efficient as you can easily adjust resource allocation within your allocated share, allowing for greater control and growth potential.
How does cloud hosting work?
Cloud hosting uses a cloud network – a network of interconnected physical servers offering a massive virtual pool of computing resources. This pool is then divided into smaller virtual servers and are allocated to individual user applications. Cloud technology consists of the following features:
- Virtualization
- Resource pooling
- On-demand allocation
- High availability and disaster recovery
- Security
1. Virtualization
Cloud hosting leverages virtualization technology, where a hypervisor software carves multiple virtual machines (VMs) from a single physical server. These VMs share the server’s hardware but operate independently with dedicated OS, memory, storage, and resources. This isolation ensures non-interference and simplifies application deployment. Additionally, scaling individual VMs is seamless, as they can flexibly acquire or release resources from the shared pool on the parent server.
Cloud providers allocate a set number of VMs and resources upon signup based on your chosen plan. This pay-as-you-go model dynamically adjusts resources, adding or removing VMs according to usage. This flexibility empowers organizations to deploy new VMs swiftly, scale existing ones, and expand their infrastructure to meet fluctuating computational demands.
2. Resource Pooling
The power of cloud hosting lies in resource pooling. A vast network of interconnected physical servers distributed across multiple locations hosts numerous virtual machines (VMs). These VMs collectively form a massive pool of computing resources, including CPU, RAM, storage, and network bandwidth. Cloud technology abstracts these interconnected VMs into a unified virtual entity for your organization, allowing you to dynamically allocate or release resources based on your unique needs. Additionally, the cloud provider continuously monitors and manages this pool to ensure optimal utilization and high availability, guaranteeing your applications have the resources they require precisely when needed.
3. On-Demand Allocation
Cloud hosting embraces a flexible on-demand allocation model. Upon subscribing, you receive a set number of scalable virtual machines (VMs) from the centralized pool. Additional resources are seamlessly allocated from the pool to accommodate the surge as your computational needs increase. Conversely, when demand subsides, your resources automatically scale down, minimizing costs. This allows you to pay only for what you use, eliminating unnecessary expenses during off-peak times. Moreover, on-demand allocation empowers you to handle anticipated and unexpected traffic spikes without compromising performance or experiencing service disruptions.
4. High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Cloud hosting boasts unparalleled high availability and disaster recovery due to its distributed architecture. Virtual servers for each user reside across diverse geographic locations, forming a resilient pool. Even if a node or data center fails, your application seamlessly leverages available instances, ensuring continuity. Automated backups stored in multiple regions further empower rapid recovery from major disruptions. This inherent redundancy safeguards your application and grants peace of mind against unforeseen events.
5. Security
Cloud hosting shares the need for robust security with traditional web hosting. Protecting operations, data integrity, confidentiality, and authenticity demands comprehensive measures. Cloud providers implement sophisticated protocols and security practices for physical and virtual server security. This multi-layered approach safeguards hosted applications and data from diverse threats, both internal and external. Typical security features include firewalls, granular identity management, access control, and data encryption (like SSL) for data transmission.
Cloud Hosting Vs. Traditional Web Hosting
Flexibility & Scalability
Traditional web hosting packages its resource offerings like CPU cores, memory (RAM), storage, and bandwidth into various pricing plans. Typically, higher-priced plans offer more resources. This model requires upgrading to a higher plan when computing requirements exceed the current one and downgrading to save costs when fewer resources are needed. Moreover, the fixed, flat-fee model of these plans means paying the full price regardless of actual usage, leading to potential losses from under-utilization and making plan changes for capacity needs cumbersome. Furthermore, surpassing the server’s maximum capacity necessitates hardware and software upgrades, typically handled by the provider unless on a dedicated hosting account, further complicating hosting management.
On the other hand, cloud hosting offers better flexibility and scalability. Unlike the server-capacity-based traditional web hosting plans, cloud hosting plans are based on resource usage. Upon signing up, users are allocated a scalable resource pool. Cloud hosting plans allow for significant scaling within set limits, directly aligning with user needs. Billing is based on actual usage, embodying a pay-as-you-go model.
Furthermore, virtual server instances span multiple physical servers, allowing easy capacity expansion by configuring more instances. This enhances flexibility and scalability beyond what traditional models offer. The cloud also excels in availability, backup, and recovery, thanks to the cloud’s inherent capabilities facilitating the management of virtual servers directly via code or automated consoles, ensuring high reliability.
Cloud Hosting Vs. Shared Hosting
Shared hosting allows multiple hosting accounts to share the same physical server by isolating each account from others using one or more of the below techniques:
- User IDs and file system permissions
- cPanel/WHM or similar control panels
- Chroot jails
- Resource limits and monitoring
- Software stack isolation
Despite this isolation, shared resources can lead to slower performance under heavy load. Moreover, shared hosting is more susceptible to security breaches if any account is compromised. Nonetheless, it remains a cost-effective option compared to cloud hosting.
Cloud hosting, through virtualization, efficiently partitions hosting accounts into individual virtual machines (VMs), each with a pre-allocated pool of physical resources. This setup prevents allocation issues, guaranteeing swift response times during peak usage. Moreover, cloud hosting enforces high security with advanced protocols across application and hardware levels, offering a secure and scalable hosting solution.
Cloud Hosting Vs. Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting provides a dedicated physical server for your exclusive use, ensuring no resource sharing and leading to higher security and availability. However, it comes with higher leasing costs and significant management responsibilities, such as server administration, software updates, security measures, backups, and hardware upgrades.
Contrastingly, cloud hosting utilizes pre-configured virtual servers managed through automated routines, significantly reducing the burden of hardware management, backups, and security concerns. As a result, both administrative efforts and hosting costs are generally lower than with dedicated hosting. While users may still oversee specific tasks, the pay-as-you-go model also offers financial efficiency by ensuring payment only for utilized resources.
Cloud hosting Vs. VPS Hosting
VPS hosting provides enhanced control and a fixed allocation of resources, offering significant advantages in isolation, customization, and administration over shared hosting. Despite these benefits, VPS hosting faces scalability challenges due to the finite resources of the underlying physical servers.
While VPS and cloud hosting relieve users of administrative tasks, cloud hosting excels in scalability, reliability, and availability. This advantage is due to its use of distributed virtual servers across multiple cloud servers, with additional performance boosts from global networks and features like content delivery networks (CDN), ensuring faster and more reliable service than VPS hosting.
Conclusion
Cloud hosting offers unparalleled benefits in terms of scalability, flexibility, reliability, and security, making it the ideal solution for modern web applications, whether standalone, distributed, on-premises, or public. Streamlined and automated administrative processes liberate business owners from cumbersome tasks, allowing them to focus more on their applications and business objectives. Additionally, cloud hosting provides cost-effective solutions that are adaptable to the IT budgets of businesses and individuals alike.
As cloud hosting technologies evolve, they unlock vast potential for modern web applications to leverage advanced computing power and extensive storage capabilities. This evolution is set to fuel innovation in critical areas like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Quantum Computing, contributing to human progress across various domains.
