Cloud hosting is becoming an increasingly popular trend in hosting solutions. However, many still ask the question – do I really need it?
If my current host already seems to offer everything I need, why would I go to the cloud? Does it have anything extra to offer to myself and my business? Will it bring in more clients and higher profits?
We will find the answers to these questions by looking at the 3 main advantages of cloud hosting that you are most likely interested in.
1.) Cloud hosting handles traffic spikes much better.
This is likely the most important advantage of cloud hosting. Your website will have a much wider range of resources available to use only when it needs them.
If you experience high traffic spikes but only at certain times of the day/week/month, then cloud hosting is most likely the better and more cost-effective solution for you.
The high connectivity speed that the cloud offers means that even if your website has 10 visitors this minute and 10,000 the next, every user will still be able to browse just as fast, instead of having to fight for a single server’s limited amount of resources.
Where traditional web hosting providers often promise unlimited hosting space and traffic, you have to understand that this is not practically or even physically possible. As with everything, resources are limited.
If you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet, it does not mean that you can literally eat everything you can. It is the same thing with web hosting services. Unlimited doesn’t mean infinite.
The main advantage here for cloud computing is that it has a huge amount of resources at its disposal, for use only when those resources are needed. Your website is guaranteed to be fast, no matter what.
With traditional hosting, you pay for a fixed amount of resources regardless whether you use them or not. With cloud hosting, you will pay for precisely the resources that your website needs and uses.
To further highlight the importance of speed for your website and business, studies have shown that at least 25% of users will abandon a page that takes more than 4 seconds to load.
Furthermore, Amazon estimated that a single second slowdown on their pages could cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year. They discovered that every 100ms added to page loading time causes a 1% decrease in sales.
Google also calculated that slowing their searching process by a quarter of a second would mean losing 8 million searches in a single day!
Less searches equals less ads served, which in turn equals less profit. This means that investing in cloud hosting could pay for itself tenfold or more for a big enough business that values its online presence.
2.) Cloud hosting provides better reliability.
A website hosted in the cloud should never go down. Unless an end of the world scenario is right behind the corner, your site will be up and running 100% of the time.
Remember that in the cloud more than one single server handles your data and traffic. They are all there to make sure your website will be up and running at all times.
3.) Very fast recovery times.
Cloud computing has the technology to provide better disaster recovery services, and your backups will be ready much faster if you ever need them.
It has been found that companies using cloud hosting fixed data loss issues in an average of 2.1 hours. This is nearly 4 times faster than businesses using traditional hosting and backup plans (they took an average of 8 hours to recover).
With cloud hosting, data loss becomes much less of a worrisome scenario.
So, does my website need cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting is getting more and more popular and many refer to it as the future solution to every online hosting need.
If your website is popular enough, has big traffic spikes, needs better speed, uptime and faster backup technology, then the cloud is the way to go.
If not, it is unlikely that you need cloud hosting right now. You can stick with a reliable shared server solution, but keep the cloud in mind as the best option for when you grow big! If you don’t need cloud hosting now, let’s hope you soon will! 🙂
