What are the top five reasons to choose cloud hosting?
I’m sure you’ve all been given the advice “move to cloud”, it’s probably seeming like a weird buzzword right now. To be completely honest, it can all be a little confusing, especially with everybody voicing their opinions on which type of hosting is better.
However, it can’t be ignored; more and more people are moving to the cloud and we don’t blame them. So, we’re assuming because you’re here, you’re probably delving into the possibility of cloud hosting. Here we give you a little bit of a better understanding of what it is, and why you should just go for it.
What is Cloud Hosting?
Briefly, cloud hosting is where your applications, programs, software, and data is accessed through the internet. In comparison to physical servers; which sit in a building.
Cloud technology isn’t out of this world, we can be pretty certain that you’re in the cloud more than you think; updating your Facebook status, checking your bank balance, accessing Google Drive, eBooks and iTunes are all examples of cloud applications that you, most likely, use every day.
Cloud basically makes applications, software, and data accessible everywhere you go, across the globe, at any time. In fact, cloud technology solves the many challenges that we (especially businesses) face every day.
What is the traditional hosting?
To better understand cloud hosting, we feel it is necessary to very briefly explain just what traditional hosting is.
Traditional hosting comes in one of two forms; dedicated or shared. Dedicated is basically a physical server, usually in the office building, which offers the complete resources, bandwidth, RAM, CPU and drive space.
Shared hosting basically means that businesses pay for a certain amount of storage on a single server, whilst also sharing that server with other websites.
Both of these options have drawbacks regarding security, uptime and flexibility...which is why many are turning to cloud hosting.
Without further ado, let’s list the top five reasons.
1. Uptime
The performance of your website is directly linked to the server uptime. With cloud hosting, you get the maximum network uptime and there’s no point of failure. Without getting into too much detail, the system is built of interconnected servers, so, if for whatever reason one server fails, one of the many other servers will take over by default.
A traditional hosting option would leave you open to hardware failure and potential downtime of your website and applications.
As we all know, a website that crashes will lose visitors, thus losing business.
2. Updates
One of the most appealing aspects of cloud hosting is the fact that there’s automatic software updates, including the all-important security updates. You don’t even have to think about them – hooray!
Traditional hosting would require you to maintain the system yourself, including any updates. When this is completed for you, automatically, you don’t have to worry about them. This gives you more time to focus on growing your business or website or just, quite simply, prioritizing other things without any worry.
3. Flexibility
We’d say that the most attractive factor of cloud hosting lies with how flexible it is, in more than one way.
Firstly, with cloud hosting, you can increase or decrease your cloud capacity depending on your fluctuating demands. This means you only pay for exactly what you need, with no hassle when you need to change.
Secondly, cloud servers allow you to work from anywhere. If you’ve got an internet connection, you can be at your office. This gives you and your employees a lot more freedom, allowing everybody to enjoy an easier work-life balance. We can’t speak for everyone but working from home, even occasionally, would make a world of difference to our productivity.
4. Security
Security comes in many forms, and cloud hosting covers them all. You name it, customer identity control, encrypted solutions, firewalls, backup recovery, storage segregation, and data isolation. It truly covers it all.
In addition to this, imagine you lose your laptop (although we hope this never happens), cloud hosting gives you the option to remotely wipe data from your lost laptop, but also gives you the added the advantage that you haven’t lost the data – it's all stored in the cloud. This gives you peace of mind, even in the worst of situations.
5. Eco-friendly
Okay, we had to mention it. We think it’s such an important consideration to make in today’s world. It’s also kind of nice to know that, whilst you may be benefiting yourself and your business, you aren’t committing an entirely selfish act, the earth appreciates it too.
Cloud hosting completely eliminates the need for in house servers and their upkeep. Most people don’t realize that managing and processing data with traditional hostings, such as a local server, can greatly increase carbon emissions.
Cloud servers are utilized to their full capacity with better infrastructure and reduced use of electricity. In a time when “go green” is absolutely the right way to move forward, it makes complete sense to choose the cloud.
Amazon, Facebook, and Google are just a few of the big names that have decided to make efforts towards being environmentally friendly. Maybe you should follow in their footsteps?
Time to move to the cloud
We really hope these benefits have persuaded you to move yourself or your business to the cloud. We could have honestly made the list longer, but we assume that you get the picture.
Obviously, we know your business needs might differ, we hope you can just use this as a general guide to making the best decision for yourself. We believe that your business can truly excel using cloud hosting, providing you with easy solutions that will effortlessly adapt to your needs. Maybe it could be the choice for you.