What Is Cloud Hosting? Here’s What Your Small Business Needs to Know

You depend on your website to perform many different functions. It’s the entryway into your business where people can learn more and decide if they want to work with you or not.

Your site’s performance often influences that decision. That’s why it’s important to have a website hosting plan that ensures that people can always access your site.

You have a number of different options when it comes to hosting plans, from shared hosting to cloud hosting.

What is cloud hosting and how does it compare to other plans?

Keep reading to find out.

What Does a Website Host Do?

Most website hosts offer a lot of different plans and services. They will host your website and email accounts. They may sell domain names and SSL certificates, too. But it’s always better to buy it separately because using services like cheap SSL Certificate can save you some money.

How does a web host impact your site and your business? This is the core of how a website host works and how they work in the World Wide Web.  

The internet works kind of like a telephone. When you place a call, various networks all communicate with each other to route your call to the person you want to reach.

On the internet, when you enter a domain name, your “call” gets routed until you reach the website host of the domain name. The website host maintains the files that make up that website.

Upon receiving your request to visit the website, the host’s servers will then send the site’s files to your browser.

There are a number of factors that make up site speed, such as the size of your site’s files. However, your host does play a significant role.

Different Types of Hosting Plans

How quickly your web host serves up your information depends on the speed of their servers and your hosting plan. These are some of the options you have when you look at hosting plans.

Shared Hosting 

This is usually the option that small business owners go with. It’s the most affordable option. You’re renting space on a host’s servers with a lot of other people. That means that you’re sharing the resources of servers.

That can affect your business in a number of ways. If someone else gets a spike in traffic, they could be hogging the resources on the server, slowing down your site.

VPS Hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. This means that you are sharing a server with other accounts. The difference here is that the server is partitioned, so you have more control over your server than you would with shared hosting.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting has become a viable option for sites that want to have the control of VPS without sharing resources with other accounts. Cloud hosting uses a lot of different servers to store your website.

How does cloud hosting compare to VPS hosting? Check this out to compare VPS vs Cloud hosting plans.

Benefits of Cloud Hosting

It seems like out of all of the hosting plans, your cloud hosting may be the best option for you. There are a number of benefits of cloud hosting you should know before you choose a hosting plan.

Redundancy Is Good

In most business functions, redundancy is a bad word. It is usually associated with waste.

In the world of computing, redundancy is a good thing. It means that you have multiple copies of your website stored on multiple servers.

On a shared or VPS plan, if your server goes down, your site goes down. With cloud hosting, if one server goes down, other servers can step in and pick up the slack. That keeps your site running.

Scalable Hosting

Let’s say you have a business that gets a huge spike in traffic around the holidays. With a shared hosting plan, your site could slow down because you hit the limit of your allocated resources. That can kill your holiday business.

Your option would be to upgrade to a new hosting plan that has a ton of resources that you don’t use for the majority of the year.

Cloud hosting allows you to scale up or down according to your needs. That makes it a cost-effective way to host your site without wasting resources.

Better Security

When you’re on a shared hosting plan you have to share space with other accounts. While hosting companies do their best to keep every site safe and secure, it is possible to have a bad neighbor on your server.

They could be victims of a cyberattack because they didn’t update their website. That can put all accounts on that server at risk, including yours.

Faster Performance

Did you get that site speed matters a lot to your customers? That’s the one area where cloud hosting excels. Since your site is loaded by several different servers, the resources used are split evenly between those different servers.

With other types of hosting plans, your loading speed is at the mercy of one server and the resources available.

What Is Cloud Hosting?

Your business largely depends on having a website that people can access at their convenience. If your site is down for any reason or it takes a long time to load, you lost a customer.

You want to set your business up for success. Don’t overlook the impact that your web host and your hosting plan have on your business.

There are a number of plans to choose from, including VPS, shared, and cloud hosting plans. What is cloud hosting? It’s an affordable way to improve the performance and security of your site. That ensures that you have a good foundation to build your business.

Do you want to know more ways you can build your business? Check out this site often for more great tips.

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.