Is Cloud Hosting Better than Dedicated Hosting?

For as long as there has been the Internet, there has been some kind of web host to store and run websites. And as long as there’s been web hosting, and even more so today when everyone’s online all the time, dedicated hosting has been thought to be the best of the best in the industry.

But web hosting continues to develop on many levels and as it does, it continues to offer more choice and options to the customer. That’s never been clearer than in the case of cloud hosting, and it’s even had some questioning whether this is in fact now the best kind of web hosting there is.

With dedicated web hosting, you are given an entire server to run and maintain your website. All the resources on that server are yours, and you can customize it in just about any way you’d like. It’s for these reasons that dedicated hosting as long been thought to be the best.

But, what if you could have even more than just one web server servicing your website? What if you could have five or six? Or two or three? Or all of these in the same day? Those are exactly the kinds of possibilities that come with cloud computing. And they’re exactly the benefits that have some thinking cloud computing is better than dedicated.

With cloud hosting, your website is placed on a server “on the cloud,” or in a cluster. Within that cloud there are many different servers that are all connected to each other within the cloud. If one server becomes depleted of certain resources such as bandwidth, it can draw on other servers in the cloud; and in return it can supply other servers in the cloud with resources should they ever start to run low. It’s this benefit that cloud hosting actually has over dedicated; instead of having the resources of just one server, you have the resources of several.

The cost difference between cloud hosting and dedicated hosting also cannot be overlooked when you’re comparing the two. Just as dedicated hosting as always been known as the very best kind of web hosting you could invest in, it’s also always been the most expensive. Cloud computing however, is far cheaper than dedicated, and in some instances can also be free for small websites.

Cloud hosting still has a little ways to come before it can truly be called the dominant type of web hosting on the market. But there’s no arguing that of all the different kinds of web hosting, cloud hosting has come the farthest in the shortest amount of time. And it can also be said that in many ways it actually has more to offer than dedicated hosting. And soon with just a little more development, it could become the preferred type of web hosting for most websites.