The newest kid on the block is cloud hosting.
But should you switch from tried-and-true traditional hosting to cutting-edge cloud hosting for your website?
As you can expect, there isn’t a clear or obvious solution to this question because there are so many things to consider.
So that you may assess your alternatives, we’ll examine what each hosting provider has to offer in this piece, including its advantages and disadvantages. We’ll then provide you with a list of the top three traditional and cloud hosting companies to help you decide.
The main differences between cloud hosting and traditional hosting
Let’s start by examining the main differences between traditional and cloud hosting.
Traditional hosting
Your website is housed on a solitary server in a solitary datacenter with typical web hosting. You can select from a number of traditional hosting options based on the size of your website, the amount of traffic it receives, and your level of technical expertise.
Shared hosting – The cheapest option as your site shares the resources of a single web server with other websites. It’s best-suited for beginners who want to get their first website online.
VPS hosting – Like shared hosting, a VPS hosts several websites on a single physical machine. But unlike shared hosting, the server is split into several self-contained virtual servers. VPS is the logical step up when you’ve outgrown shared hosting.
Dedicated hosting – The most expensive option means you get an entire server to yourself. There’s no sharing involved, either physically or virtually. It’s best-suited to larger businesses and high-traffic websites that get over 500,000 page views a month.
Cloud hosting
Cloud hosting is different. Instead of hosting your website on a single server, it’s spread across different servers in different locations that are all connected via the Internet. You use a “virtual machine” to access the different servers across the “cloud” and manage your website.
Cloud hosting is a relatively new kind of hosting, but it’s becoming more popular as it has several benefits over traditional hosting.
Reliability – Because your website is spread across several interconnected servers that are all storing the same information, it’s no problem if one server goes offline because the others fill the gap, and your site remains online.
Scalability – If your website traffic fluctuates up and down, then you’d most likely find shared hosting resources were overused and dedicated hosting resources were under-used. But cloud hosting can scale up or down as required by tapping into the resources of more virtual machines in the cloud. Some hosts offer auto-scaling when the extra traffic kicks in, so you don’t have to worry about it.
Flexibility – With cloud hosting, you only pay for the server resources you use. So if traffic goes up, your host scales up resources, and you pay for the extra. But if traffic goes down, then your host scales down resources, and you pay less.
Because you only pay for what you use, Cloud hosting is usually more expensive than shared hosting but more affordable than dedicated hosting, with prices starting from $10 per month.
Cloud hosting vs traditional hosting vs managed hosting
So now you know the main differences between cloud and traditional hosting, let’s throw a spanner in the works…
Earlier, we said VPS and Dedicated Hosting were types of traditional hosting. But, they’re also available as VPS and Dedicated Cloud Hosting, too.
And then, there’s also the Managed and Unmanaged options to consider as well because both Traditional and Cloud Hosting are available as Managed and Unmanaged services.
But don’t fret, because later on, we’ll show you different examples of these, so you get a clear picture of what’s available.
Pros and cons of cloud hosting
Now you know more about Cloud hosting, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of using a Cloud hosting service.
Pros of cloud hosting
- Pricing – Cloud hosting is more affordable than traditional dedicated hosting.
- Scalability – If you find your business is growing, you can quickly scale resources by asking for more resources (CPU, Memory, and Storage) from your host.
- Security – Cloud hosting is one of the most secure types of hosting as viruses and malware can be isolated to one virtual machine.
- Performance – Cloud hosting offers unlimited resources, so your website will always run at top speed.
Cons of cloud hosting
- Pricing – Some Cloud hosting providers will charge overages so you may pay more than you think. However, some companies like Nexcess don’t charge overages for their WordPress-managed Cloud offering.
- Complexity – Cloud hosting is not as beginner-friendly as shared or WordPress managed hosting. This can vary depending on the provider.
Pros and cons of traditional hosting
Now let’s remind ourselves of the advantages and disadvantages of using a traditional hosting service.
Pros of traditional hosting
- Pricing – Traditional shared hosting is the cheapest type of hosting, with prices from $2.59 per month.
- Scalability – Traditional VPS hosting lets you quickly scale resources if you find your website traffic is growing. However, there is a limit to scalability and once there’s no extra availability on the server, you’d potentially need to move your site to a new server or a dedicated server.
Cons of traditional hosting
- Pricing – Traditional dedicated hosting is the most expensive type of hosting, with prices from $199/month.
- Downtime – With traditional shared hosting, there’s a risk that your site may get taken offline because another website on the server has become infected with a virus or malware.
- Scalability – It’s harder to scale a dedicated physical server as it’s already big to start with. You may have to migrate to a larger server, rather than extending the resources you already have. Traditional shared hosting has limited resources, so as soon as your business grows, you’ll have to upgrade to VPS or dedicated hosting.
Best Cloud Hosting Provider
Are you looking Windows dedicated cloud server with an affordable price? As the leader of Windows ASP.NET hosting provider, ASPHostPortal offers the best, most reliable, and cheap Windows dedicated cloud server. Their Windows dedicated cloud server plan starts from $12.99/mo. This is the best price ever for a reliable Windows dedicated cloud server.
Why ASPHostPortal is The Best and Cheap Windows Dedicated Cloud Server Provider?
A Windows-dedicated cloud server is the perfect solution for growing websites. ASPHostPortal’s Windows Cloud Servers provide scalability, redundancy, and flexibility. A Cloud Server allows you to start small, and scale resources as needed.
Safe and Reliable Windows Dedicated Cloud Server
High availability is built-in to the architecture of their cloud servers. This means any hardware can fail. Be it storage, compute or network components, without the cloud servers actually being impacted. Full redundancy is engineered into their cloud platform. If anything fails, cloud servers are automatically moved to other hardware and hosts to ensure maximum safety and performance.
Expert Support Team
They provide 24/7 support via a ticketing system for all urgent issues. This means that regardless of the time of day, you will always be helped by qualified support engineers. This ticketing support system is included free of charge for all their customers and partners. They believe that the reliability of your cloud servers should always be their highest priority and therefore they don’t charge for assisting you with any issue relating to their cloud infrastructure.
Uptime
Their high availability, highly-redundant infrastructure comes with built-in redundancy. Utilize the benefits of having your cloud environments in multiple data centers. Merger of snapshots won’t cause you downtime – meaning no need for a restart while a virtual machine is running. They’re disaster recovery-friendly and offer a 100% uptime SLA.