web hosting

Do You Need Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting services have generated a lot of buzz in recent times.  While you may or may have not heard of this type of offering before, you are probably more familiar with it than you think.  In fact, if use Gmail for checking your webmail, Flickr for sharing photos and perform online searches with Google, you are making use of services that operate in the cloud hosting infrastructure.  Let’s take a closer look at this unique form of hosting to see what the cloud has to offer.

What is Cloud Hosting?

Also known as clustered hosting, cloud hosting is a solution that often uses virtualization technology to facilitate load balancing, security and system resources over multiple servers.  This basically means that instead of relying a single piece of hardware, your website and applications can benefit from the resources of multiple servers.   In the typical shared hosting environment, a website is limited to the bandwidth, disk space, RAM, processing power and others resources allocated to the physical machine.  Cloud hosting is a concept that frees you of these limitations, providing you with on-demand access to an infrastructure that is virtually inexhaustible.  The mere structure of the cloud makes it easy to scale up or down based on your individual requirements.

Who Needs Cloud Hosting?

Throughout the years, a countless number of websites have been the victims of their own success.  This is the website then ends up suffering because of its sudden boost in popularity and traffic.  The environment in which this situation occurs the most is shared web hosting.  Once your website exceeds the limitations of a single physical server, it is susceptible to choking.   Cloud hosting is the perfect alternative as it gives you access to a cluster of servers, allowing your website to benefit from additional bandwidth, RAM, processing power and other resources it might require.  The major selling point to this solution as that you can obtain this extra boost in computing power when you need it.  If the popularity of your website subsides a bit, you can easily place the resources back into the cloud and make them available to other users.

Are There Other Benefits?

Cloud hosting services offer benefits from numerous angles.  The most obvious advantages are its scalability and cost efficiency.  Being that cloud computing is a highly scalable technology, websites and applications can be expanded greatly thanks to the additional resources.  Dealing with slow responses and frequent crashes just because your site experienced a sudden surge in traffic is a common thing in the shared hosting environment.  The cloud’s scalability allows you to avoid this problem with ease.  Another major benefit of cloud hosting is the flexible pay-per-usage model.  When signing up with a provider, you are only charged for the amount of computing power you use, similar to how you pay for your gas and electrical bill.   No longer do you have to lease and maintain a costly and complex dedicated server just to improve performance.   These are a few of many benefits that have made the cloud the talk of the IT world.

Advanced Web Hosting Technology

Along with the web hosting industry comes a lot of unfamiliar terms and technical jargon.  While some are self explanatory and a bit easier to process, others are downright confusing, especially to the newcomer who knows little to nothing about the industry.  This article will introduce you to some of the more advanced terms and explain their meanings.

Availability

Often referred to as uptime, the availability of a system describes its accessibility and ability to provide a level of redundancy that works to prevent failure at any single point.  For instance, if only one server is responding to HTTP requests, the server qualifies as a single point of failure.  If there are two web servers in a load balancing scheme, then the load balancer itself is the single point of failure.  Most high availability systems are equipped with efficient fault-tolerance mechanisms to ensure the necessary redundancies.  Because 100% availability is costly and rather difficult to achieve, the industry standard in the web hosting business is at around 99.9%.

Load Balancing

Load balancing is a method web hosting providers employ to more evenly distribute the system load over a group of available servers.  This technology is used to ensure that all servers process their fair share of requests without being overworked and more susceptible to failing.  There are many types of load balancers and these mechanisms come in both software and hardware varieties.

Response time and Transaction Load

The performance of a server is associated with the response time of a given transaction load.  In regard to a website, it is measured by the time it takes to load web pages and process requests to the web server.  The performance of large, high traffic websites can be greatly enhanced by upgrading hardware, residing on a dedicated server or utilizing load balancing technology.  In many cases, fine tuning software packages such as MySQL and PHP can also increase response times.

Scalability

The scalability of a system generally refers to the property that enables it to service any given load by upgrading hardware or incorporating additional services in a predetermined manner.  It essentially describes an instance in which performance and throughput can still be maintained once the load increases.  Scalability is a great quality to have in a web hosting solution as it can support the growth and increasing needs of your website.

Session State

Session state is often needed to maintain the connection of a client program and a given server.  This typically needs to be done to accommodate a user who is logged into the system.  If the topology consists of multiple servers, maintaining session state is crucial and something that must be taken care.  Most load balancing software applications on the market provide facilities that enable this to done.  The most common methods are implementing cookies and rewriting URLs with the server details included.  load_balance.htm

Throughput

Though closely tied to performance, throughput is best described as the number of concurrent transactions the server is able to process.  The higher the throughput, the more processing power to the system.

Do You Need Dedicated Hosting?

Has your online business grown to the point where it exceeds the offerings of a shared hosting environment?  If so, it might to time to upgrade to dedicated hosting.  Often referred to as a dedicated server, dedicated hosting is a solution where you have the entire server to yourself.  The hosting provider monitors the hardware, routing equipment and network connectivity while granting you control over the server software.   Though more complex and expensive than shared hosting, leasing a dedicated server gives you the unparalleled flexibility and control needed to run a thriving business that experiences a high volume of web traffic.

Because of its highly technical nature, many online business owners elect to outsource the administrative tasks of their dedicated servers to experienced IT professionals.  Despite the costs and complexity, dedicated hosting can serve numerous benefits to your business, especially if you have the resources required to maintain the server.  Below are just a few of many advantages you will enjoy with this advanced web hosting solution.

Faster Server Response

One of the biggest knocks on shared hosting is slow server response time which is the direct result of sharing the machine and associated resources with other customers.  In this hosting environment, the performance of your site could suffer drastically if another site experiences a sudden boost in traffic.  This spells bad news for your business when potential clients stop by and are greeted by pages that take forever to load.  With dedicated hosting, you have the server all to yourself, allowing you to plan for traffic levels and any other scenarios that may impact server response time.

Flexibility

What most business owners love about dedicated hosting is the flexibility it grants.  In a shared hosting environment, you are limited to the operating system, software and technologies provided the web host.  A dedicated server allows you to choose your own operating system be it Windows or Linux, as well as customized software applications that best suite your business.

Scalability

Scalability is what you need to support the growth of your business.  Whereas options for upgrading are limited on a shared server, dedicated hosting allows you to scale up or down at any time.  With this hosting solution you can increase the amount of storage space, RAM processors and even purchase additional bandwidth to support an increase in web traffic.

Security

Security is one of the biggest reasons to consider dedicated hosting.  Try as they may, a shared hosting provider can never guarantee the security you get with your own server.  A dedicated server will be as secure as you make it as firewalls, virus protection and other security mechanisms can be installed.  The security of your applications and client data should be of the utmost importance if you are running a business.

Conclusion

Aside from all the benefits, you should also know that dedicated hosting isn’t suited for everyone.  For instance, if you are running a small business with low to medium traffic, a shared server is probably the best option.  After establishing your business to a point where it requires more flexibility, only then should you consider moving up to dedicated hosting.