When encountering the buffet of web hosting plans for the first time, customers can easily be overwhelmed by the various options, configurations, and acronyms. Matching the right server portions and hosting flavours to your appetite can be daunting. Boasting high-powered and reliable infrastructure, cloud hosting is a fast-growing option for consumers with a somewhat more refined palate, while shared hosting serves up affordable, easy comfort food. Read on the feast of information about these two savoury web hosting choices.
Cloud hosting, a premium option that touts performance, reliability, and scalability, entails connecting and virtualizing several servers to share storage and processing resources. The hardware components are optimized to handle particular tasks, and extra servers are ready to fill in if something breaks or has to go offline. Customers can provision or turn off additional computing resources to meet traffic demands, making the product particularly relevant to growing businesses.
Shared hosting, the most common plan on the market, resonates especially with first-time site owners and individual developers. In a shared hosting provider’s datacenter, individual servers can host hundreds or thousands of websites. Several customers share each server, meaning that storage and computing resources are limited. As the cheapest and most accessible type of hosting, shared packages often come with extra features such as one-click software installations, marketing credits, and website builders.
Server Resources, Configuration, and Management
Shared hosting providers make an effort to set the table with everything beginners need to get online, often including a free domain registration, drag-and-drop site builder, email accounts, search engine marketing credits, automatic backups, and a security certificate. The host will take care of the technical details of server maintenance such as operating system updates and security patches.
Cloud hosting, however, takes a different approach; multiple servers pool their resources together and cooperate to host multiple websites. The added hardware means more resources are available to each customer — and even more can be tacked onto your account with just a click of the mouse.
Scalability
Even though numerous shared hosting providers tout unlimited resources for storage, bandwidth, databases, email accounts, and the like, so-called unlimited hosting is a myth — shared hosts commonly ask customers to enjoy their “unlimited hosting” within certain parameters deemed fair to the other customers on the server. Websites that exceed the allocated resource usage are often penalized with fees or decreased performance.
Performance
Shared hosting speed, on the other hand, can fluctuate between perfectly acceptable and downright slow. Customers’ site speed is largely dependent on the performance of other websites on the same server. The more a shared server is maxed out, whether in terms of the number of accounts or the amount of traffic it needs to handle, the slower it processes requests for information.
Cost
shared hosting gets an edge over cloud hosting when it comes to pricing and bonuses. It’s a perfect plan for those on a budget or small business owners because they can have access to all the basic features they need to get started and do so affordably. Cloud hosting, on the other hand, takes the crown when it comes to security, speed, performance, and uptime. All the features packed into this plan making it ideal for medium to large sized business or generally those websites that tend to receive huge traffic.