A common misconception in hosting marketing is that all hosting is cloud hosting. This is simply not true and often just marketing speak. Cloud hosting offers a unique feature set that shared hosting can not provide.
The main difference between the two types of hosting is the number of servers available to your website. In traditional shared hosting setups your website will be sharing a single server with potentially hundreds or even thousands of other websites. There is nothing wrong with this and this is exactly how hosting providers are able to keep prices down. By hosting hundreds of sites on 1 server the hosting company can spread of the costs of keeping that server online across each company that is hosted there.
With cloud hosting your website doesn’t sit on just one server, instead you have access to a pool of servers. This can be any number from a few to a whole data centre depending on your cloud provider. Yes, you will be sharing these servers with other websites, however, with access to a lot more servers you are not likely to ever find you are hitting resource limits.
Why shared hosting can be slow
It doesn’t matter how much you optimise your website with shared hosting your website can still be slow. This is because you are competing for the same CPU, RAM and bandwidth of your host server as everyone else on that server. If you are unlucky enough to be sat on the same server as a very popular website that is not optimised correctly you will suffer the impact of that. The unoptimised site will take more of the host servers resources leaving your site with less horsepower to play with.
Why cloud hosting isn’t always faster
For cloud hosting to work well it relies heavily on caching and caching is only effective if you get a steady stream of traffic to your website. Due to the nature of a multi server environment everything in the cloud is networked and these network connections can be slower than accessing resourced saved all in one place like with shared hosting.
If your site gets a good level of traffic your resources will be cached on many of the servers within the cloud minimising the internal network requests required to deliver a page to a user and in turn speeding everything up.
Is there a limit to scaling on the cloud
Yes, the cloud is not unlimited, while often sold that way by marketing teams there is a limit. Most of the time this limit is so high you will never reach it. In the case of Google’s Cloud platform you would need to be operating at an immense scale to run out of resources. Google Cloud allows you to not only scale within the same data centre but spread your load across different data centres around the world. In theory if you are big enough to run out of resources on Google Cloud, you would be running your own cloud system anyway.
That said some smaller cloud hosting providers may not have the resources for massive scale but all cloud providers should have enough capacity to see you through a feature on BBC News.
Which is right for me
There is a lot more to unpick and every website is different so picking a universal best is not possible. To complicate things further, every cloud provider is different and optimise for different platforms and applications. If you are not sure what you need you can always give us a call and we will review your specifics and make a personal recommendation. We offer a range of hosting including cloud hosting, shared hosting and virtual private hosting.
