Although the cloud paradigm has taken off over the years, some people still choose to rely on self-hosted websites, virtual hosts and dedicated hosts. While there are scenarios where other options are reasonable, cloud hosting provides a number of significant advantages. Here are three of the most important.
Speed and Performance
The cloud paradigm relies on finely distributed hosting: Major cloud provides have ample resources to serve the large quantity of content they store, and they often provide excellent geographical coverage as well. When you move your site to the cloud, you can take advantage of these powerful networks. Note that even if your website seems to perform well, sudden increases in traffic can slow your performance to a halt. Furthermore, the speed benefits of cloud hosting can help your site perform better in search engine rankings.
Improved Uptime
When keeping a website on a specific server, there’s always a risk of failure should any portion of your infrastructure fail. Software errors commonly erode uptime, but a single failure across the network can leave your website inaccessible as well. By switching to cloud hosting, you can be assured that your website will remain accessible even if there’s a hardware or software glitch along the way. Modern cloud infrastructure can replace and even virtually rebuild a failed server almost instantaneously, leading to an interruption-free experience for users.
Better Cost
Cloud providers can take advantage of economies of scale. Because they buy so much equipment to keep up with demand, they’re able to purchase equipment at far lower costs and pass these savings on to their users. Furthermore, cloud pricing scales exceptionally well compared to most traditional hosting options. Those who have grand visions for their sites will benefit from this cost flexibility and predictability. Whether your future growth relies on more bandwidth or more sites, switching to the cloud can save a substantial amount of money.
The cloud is become the standard for hosting content online, and this trend shows no signs of changing for the foreseeable future. Providers of online content typically want to differentiate themselves from competitors by providing better content and better design. By moving to the cloud, users can avoid the hassles of self-hosting or dealing with standalone virtual or dedicated servers and focus on more important tasks.