Cloud hosting has been a widely accepted part of the public vocabulary for the best part of eight years now, yet there is still uncertainty and confusion about its pros and cons among some potential users.
Posted on 17 February 2017 -
BY Tibus
In this article we will look at some of the key cloud hosting advantages and disadvantages, including some or the dangers - whether real or perceived - of hosting your data in the cloud. So, let’s get into some of the pros and cons.
The key advantage of cloud hosting over the technologies that preceded it and the current alternatives is the ease of scalability. Hosting in the cloud opens up the possibility for your infrastructure to encompass multiple servers to provide extra capacity. This allows for the flexibility to scale up quickly to deal with unexpected traffic surges, but also to create an infrastructure that can grow with your requirements over a longer period.
For the reasons mentioned above that cloud hosting offers greater scalability, it also offers better performance. That’s because in addition to the increased capacity leading to increased availability for your customers, it also allows for load balancing across multiple servers. The end result is less strain on any one server and better user experience for everyone.
Cloud hosting can remove the need for you to buy, house and maintain your own hardware, which reduces capital expenditure. And the ease with which you can scale up or down means you don’t have to pay for unused capacity.
Another cloud hosting advantage is that is makes disaster recovery much easier, especially if you're already using a multi-server hosting architecture.
If you and your web host are following best practice, the security risks associated with cloud hosting are minimal. That said, some organisations feel more secure knowing that all their data is within a metal box that they can put their hands on. A private cloud is usually the sensible compromise in these circumstances.
This is dependent on the type of cloud hosting your choose but certainly for cloud hosting firms that are perhaps resellers or not particularly thorough in their setup, downtime can be an issue.
Since your web hosting infrastructure is in the cloud, your access to your data is dependent on internet access. Generally, internet access is not hard to come by but it still raises the possibility of your ability to maintain your data and website being tied to the reliability of your internet service provider.
Explore cloud hosting and get more detail on the different options available to you.
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