Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Hosting?

[Jason Chan]

Hi guys,
I would like to know about advantages and disadvantages of cloud hosting, i've not used this type of hosting before, which things will it give to my websites if I buy a cloud hosting?
Plz share your experience if you knew about it

 

[ElixantTechnology]

Unless you're running a corporate-grade application or extremely high traffic website, then jumping into the cloud is really not that good of an idea as you really won't notice any kind of difference. We have had this discussion quite a few times in this forum you should be able to fine the details.

How big is your website? How much traffic does it see? More than likely it'd run perfectly inside of a Shared Hosting environment. What made you decide to look into Cloud Hosting?

 

[Jason Chan]

Jason Chan

No...my website has low traffic, I don't know about Cloud Hosting, just curious a bit when i need it.

 

[priya_soren]

Hi guys,
I would like to know about advantages and disadvantages of cloud hosting, i've not used this type of hosting before, which things will it give to my websites if I buy a cloud hosting?
Plz share your experience if you knew about it

Cloud hosting only disadvantage is the price usually cloud hosting doesn't much required for a small website so if you paying cloud hosting to host your blog you are actually burning you money on things that you won't require.

 

[King-Servers]

Really cant think about a disadvantage of cloud hosting, however, I would not recommend it for a small website as you wont require that much CPU resources, so you will end paying more than what you actually require. Cloud hosting is scalable and that gives it advantage over dedicated server too.

 

[TSOHost - Akin]

Hi guys,
I would like to know about advantages and disadvantages of cloud hosting, i've not used this type of hosting before, which things will it give to my websites if I buy a cloud hosting?
Plz share your experience if you knew about it

Hi Jason,

To answer this question we really need you to define what you mean by Cloud Hosting because unfortunately the word "cloud" is misused so frequently these days that is has lost all meaning.

Below are just three common meanings of 'Cloud Hosting':

1. Any form of offsite hosting -- For example, when you access a file on your Google Drive or iCloud you are reading/editing/listening to a file on your local PC/Laptop/Mac/Phone but the file is not physically stored on that device. It is stored on Google/Apple's servers in one of their datacentres. It is "in the cloud".

2. Any form of Shared Hosting -- Usually used for small websites and blogs that are not business critical, Shared Hosting is when there are many hundreds of websites all hosted on the same physical server, perhaps all shared one IP address. This is standard, web hosting for novices and where most people will start. Shared Hosting is often very cheap however due to the number of sites involved and the large customer base, many hosting suppliers often put a lot of money into their Shared Hosting platform so it is usually very highly-available and resilient.

3. A cluster of dedicated server for private use -- This could be 3 or 4 dedicated servers or several hundred servers, all within your own private network where you can house your entire infrastructure. For example you could have a private firewall, two dedicated load balancers, several dedicated web server machines, redundant database server, development servers, etc. all within your own VLAN. This is your own private/public cloud.

I presume ElixantTechnology above is talking about option 3 however I suspect you are actually referring to option 2. Could you clarify?

 

[german]

Five Disadvantages Of Cloud
1.Security & Privacy
2.Dependency (loss of control):
3.Cost
4.Decreased flexibility
5.Knowledge And Integration

 

[ElixantTechnology]

ElixantTechnology

1. You actually achieve ultimate security & privacy with a properly configured Dedicated Server. Within the cloud you are still in a shared environment (VPS), the only difference is you have a little bit of added redundancy that 99.9% of people will never need to utilize in their lifetime.

2. You still get control while within the "Cloud", as all it is is a VPS within a cluster.

3. Cost.. It is damn expensive if you're looking to get into the cloud. For example, I can set you up with a Dedicated Server for $80 per month that will cost with equivelant specifications in the cloud about $500 per month.

I just wanted to highlight those three key points. There never really is an advantage of going into the cloud. The only real advantage of utilizing a virtual server is that you get more control over the environment that your website is hosted in, while still sitting within a shared environment.

If you're looking to upgrade from a VPS, then it is time for you to look into a Dedicated Server. There are a lot of Dedicated Providers out there that can provide you with excellent hadware at a decent price (better than a VPS).

 

[Jason Chan]

Really cant think about a disadvantage of cloud hosting, however, I would not recommend it for a small website as you wont require that much CPU resources, so you will end paying more than what you actually require. Cloud hosting is scalable and that gives it advantage over dedicated server too.

@King-Servers, my college has got about 10 websites and they are running on a VPS but sometimes it must auto restart because high loading on RAM and ran slowly, should switch to a dedicated server or cloud hosting?

when does a website need dedicated server or cloud hosting? please show me details :rolleyes2:

Hi Jason,

........ 3. A cluster of dedicated server for private use -- This could be 3 or 4 dedicated servers or several hundred servers, all within your own private network where you can house your entire infrastructure. For example you could have a private firewall, two dedicated load balancers, several dedicated web server machines, redundant database server, development servers, etc. all within your own VLAN. This is your own private/public cloud.

@TSOHost

Are you explaining how is a cloud hosting in this point?

 

[TSOHost - Akin]

TSOHost - Akin

Looking at the addition information that you have provided I can explain perfectly with your example.

Your colleague has approximately 10 websites running on a single VPS. This means that all of the site rely on that single VPS to be up and running in order to be online. If there is high memory usage and the system needs to be restarted, all of the 10 websites will go offline. To combat this you can do five things:

1. You can create your own cluster as described above by splitting the website files from the database. Perhaps a single web server (VPS) and a single database server (VPS) so that the memory and CPU usage on each server goes down overall.

2. You can use two or three identical VPS's (similar to the one that you already have) and make use of DNS Load-Balancing, and/or file replication so that the load is split amongst the separate machines. This would mean that if one VPS needed to be restarted, all traffic would be automatically redirected to the remaining online VPS/VPS's.

3. You can combine Option 1 and Option 2 above having multiple web server VPS's and a separate database VPS.

4. You can upgrade to a single Dedicated Server. This will almost undoubtedly solve your issue, providing increased performance AND mitigating the high-memory issue.

5. You could move to traditional Shared Hosting. Many people see this as a down-grade but as mentioned earlier, most hosting provider have a very strong Shared hosting platform made up of several hundred servers, each with a huge amount of RAM, in a single large cluster. As such, a small VPS is often out-performed by a Shared Hosting Cloud package.

 

[Jason Chan]

Jason Chan

Great information @TSOHost!

Honestly, you said exactly which we;re thinking (move to a Dedicated Server soon) because we're paying for a vps with ~$90/month but i want to know, manage a VPS and manage a Dedicated Server, it has more different things?

 

[TSOHost - Akin]

TSOHost - Akin

Presuming your VPS makes use of a control panel such as cPanel/WHM, Plesk or WebsitePanel there will be no difference to the management of the server. From your end everything will look exactly the same (aside from the increased performance of course!)

The only difference is that a physical Dedicated Server is harder to customize/upgrade/downgrade so you will need to pick your server specification allocating enough RAM and HDD for future growth.

 

[Jason Chan]

Jason Chan

Would you recommend me some features for a Dedicated Server to run ~10 sites? (estimate 100 to 500 visitors per site/day) and required loading speed must be fastest. And price is around $90 to $100/month.