What is a Cloud Server?

What is a Cloud Server?

During your journey of finding the best web hosting solution, you will of undoubtedly come across the technology that is cloud hosting. It may be something you have seen a lot and don’t fully know what the difference is between a cloud server, shared server and dedicated server.

Single dedicated servers

Since the beginning of mainstream website hosting, websites have been hosted on a single server within a data center. On these servers, you find website accounts across a whole roster of individual clients who share the resource of the server eg. RAM, Bandwidth and CPU’s. Some servers are dedicated to just one account or website and don’t share their resources. 

A cloud hosting solution works in a completely different way.

Managed cloud server

Cloud hosting dynamically spreads your data across a group of different machines. These servers work together and use ‘Virtual Machines’ to access data across the whole network of machines, which is better known as ‘The Cloud’.

Many machines working together allows the flexibility of using the computing power of the entire cloud network. This affords you to gain many advantages with your website hosting. The three key advantages of a cloud hosting solution are reliability, flexibility, adaptability and security.

Reliability

When your website data is held across multiple machines on the cloud if one part of the server fails the cloud will instantly notice this and switch your data to a working server. Same can be said about the server resource. If one website on the server is getting a lot of traffic suddenly, the cloud system can be managed and apply more resource.

If this was to happen on a dedicated server, there is a good chance that the spike in traffic would overwhelm the whole server and cause every hosted website on the server to be down for the period.

Sharing server resources with other users can feel like a gamble and when seasonal events like Christmas and Black Friday come around, the high level of traffic needs to be managed correctly so you don’t miss out on any opportunities because your website is down.

A cloud solution is set up so this does not happen and has become well known for its built-in redundancy and reliability.

Flexibility

Cloud hosting servers are set up with large amounts of resource at your disposal, however, you only pay for and use the resource you need at the time. This makes cloud servers a very affordable option.

There may be times throughout the year where your online business is more successful and needs more computing power. The scalability of a cloud server solution is where it really begins to shine. If you predict a busy time ahead and your marketing campaigns are getting ready to drive visitors to your website, your cloud server can easily be upgraded to meet the high traffic demands at the time.

A fast website and user experience are integral to online success in this day in age. Consumers can be put off with a slower than normal website experience causing them to look elsewhere. Having a hosting solution that can cope with these demands immediately, gives you the peace of mind that your business is giving the best service possible.

Adaptability

With cloud hosting, not one size fits all and it very rare to see cloud solutions packaged up and have ‘off the shelf’ options. The whole fantastic makeup of a cloud hosting infrastructure is that it can be tailor-made to meet your specific requirements. 

On creation of your cloud hosting solution, time is taken in consultation to determine every aspect of your requirements such as space, processing power, CPU’s and infrastructure. Tailoring the right fit for hosting solution moving forward.

Security

Security is one of the largest concerns in the digital world where all sorts of data are being held online. When a cloud hosting infrastructure is built, it has to be designed with security in mind. A hosting provider needs to consistently monitor the cloud server infrastructure correctly.

The application of firewalls on the cloud ‘Virtual Machines’ can quickly detect and stop threats. Collating logs of attacks can also help stop future incidents from occurring.

The use of virtualization software aids the security aspect of choosing a cloud hosting solutions. The way it interacts with the data, if properly configured, can provide a very high level of security.

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