Cloud Hosting has become a very common term and phenomena these days. If you have recently taken interest in website development, or are new to this concept, then you have landed on the right page. Here we will introduce you to the concept of cloud hosting from the beginner’s point of view.
The Cloud
These clouds don’t rain. Before going ahead and understanding cloud hosting, let’s first start with the “Cloud”. Cloud refers to the group of servers that are connected to the internet and can be used by public either freely or by paying a premium. There are various services that make use of cloud, such as file sharing, web hosting, etc. Along with this, the various servers can also be linked together in order to complete a certain task by dividing the workload. This is commonly known as cloud computing, where a task is distributed to various servers instead of 1 computing machine.
IBM Cloud is gaining a lot of popularity these days, and you can read more about it on David’s Tech Blog. There are many competitors for IBM, but the brand that IBM is makes the competitors less fierce.
You already know Google Drive. It lets you access your data from anywhere anytime. People often use the term cloud storage for this. But is it really stored in the cloud?
It can be and it can not be. As a front end user, you will never find out. If Google stores your data in multiple locations accross the globe for security and performance reasons, then it’s truly in the cloud. And it actually is.
Cloud Hosting
Now when you have an image of “Cloud” in mind, let’s move ahead and understand what is cloud hosting. Cloud hosting allows you to use online servers to meet the demands of your website. The physical server on which your website is hosted can allocate the resources to multiple virtual servers as per the demand. This service is used not just for hosting websites, but also to send and store emails, share applications, and many other tasks.
But most cloud hosting providers are not really providing you the cloud services. It’s just that they have servers available at multiple locations in the world, should you choose to utilize them all. But due to cost, most people go with one location only.
Hosting Types
Hosting is further of multiple types, most common being shared hosting and dedicated hosting. As the name implies, shared hosting allows multiple users to run their website on same set of server resources, while in dedicated hosting, each user is allocated a separate physical server for his website. In dedicated, a user has full control over the resources unlike in shared. And it is also the most secure and costly service available to host a website.
All these hostings can be cloud hosted. Hence there are many Shared Cloud Hosting, Shared VPS Hosting & Cloud Dedicated hosting as well. It’s up to you which host you choose.