Understanding your Cloud Hosting…. Really
Cloud Hosting uses the most innovative cloud computing technologies that allow an unlimited number of machines to act as one – a scalable set of virtualized servers.
If you’re new to the hosting arena, the first and foremost thought would definitely be – “That’s great, but I don’t understand any of that.”
To help you unpack what that means, let’s focus on two of the key terms in that definition: Virtualized Servers and Scalability.
Benefits of Virtualized Servers
Cloud hosting uses the concept of “virtualized servers”. This essentially means you have a space on a host server shared with other users, but it’s virtualization means that it runs autonomously or independently of the other accounts on it.
The largest benefit of virtualization is its flexibility. A virtualized server is available in real-time, on demand and is not limited to the physical constraints and capacity of a single server.
Say your site demands extra resources from its hosting platform due to spikes in visitor traffic from implementing a SEO or Google Adwords campaign. The resource is accessed seamlessly. Even when using a private cloud model, the service can often be allowed to ‘burst’ to access resources from the public cloud for non-sensitive processing if there are surges in activity on the site.
Benefits of Scalability
This type of hosting is all about incremental growth and scalability. The flexibility of virtualization is one element, but the other is being able to add more servers easily.
When your network of servers needs to expand, you introduce greater degrees of complexity. Cloud Hosting is built to minimize these growing pains by providing you with tools to handle the most complex of tasks including duplicating existing servers and handling the networking between them.
Don’t believe me?
Everyone from sole app developers to Internet behemoths like Netflix are using cloud hosting – so your business could be a good fit for it too.
Cloud hosting is hands down the most cost effective way to manage server spaces because you only pay for what you need. It lets you take small steps toward growth as opposed to gigantic leaps, waiting for your needs to catch up to your capacity.
As amazing as it is, Cloud hosting still requires a lot of expertise. Platforms like these are typically maintained by seasoned administrators and trusted cloud hosting providers.