Cloud Hosting: The Perks and Frailties

What is Cloud Hosting?
Simply put, cloud hosting can be explained as a web hosting solution that increases the power of your hosting when you have many visitors and lowers it when you have a slow day. How cool is that? Moreover, your workload is cut down immensely as local computers don’t have to go through any heavy lifting processes. The cloud computers smoothly handle several of the applications and this makes it a cost effective enterprise solution.

How does it happen?
Well, cloud hosting uses a cluster of servers interconnected with each other forming a cloud such that if you host your website on a cloud, it means it’s not hosted on a single server but on multiple servers. The word cloud also termed as ‘the cloud’ actually represents the internet. Hence, cloud computing in reality, is a type of Internet-based computing where several other services such as storage and applications are also provided to a business and their computers or devices through the internet. Being a user you have to use a web browser kind of user interface software which is provided to you by the cloud computing system.

The Perks

The most obvious benefit is that it’s cheap. It works like an electricity bill. If you use more, you pay more. If you experience a slow month, you pay less that month. That works in favor of the provider as well because then the provider can use the free infrastructure to serve other busy clients. Unlike Shared hosting, 99.9% uptime is guaranteed since your existence is not hanging with the fate of a single server.

In a cloud, if one server fails, your website is automatically switched to other servers. So it’s always accessible.

Some major benefits of using cloud computing are:

• Increased productivity with fewer people.
• Cheap Global workforce as the cloud can be accessed from anywhere in the world as long as there is internet connection.
• No need to spend a fortune on software, hardware or licensing fees.
• Effective monitoring of your projects within your budget and being ahead of your completion cycles.

Cloud hosting is a good alternative for websites that have sudden peaks in traffic. So one fine day, you need more band width, no problem! No need to hire a technician to understand how that will work. Your cloud hosting will manage it for you.

The Frailties

Although cloud computing appears to be the next best thing, there are some issues related to data security and limited data control involved with it. It is without doubt that such frailties are tied to any business/venture that works on the Internet but businesses may unknowingly add to their business risk when they shift to the cloud unless they are contented with data ownership rules and regulations and the obligation for liabilities which arise from a third party’s use of the information. As current cloud players are new, the possibility of critical data being trapped in a company succumbing to technical issues should also be kept in mind. With these issues in hand, cloud computing may require some time to be widely popular amongst the internet users all over the world.

Conclusion
Even though Cloud hosting is still a baby, it seems to have great potential in the coming years. 2014 is definitely a year for it to grow left, right and center till something better pops up. With the frailties being covered above, it is also interesting to note that several companies deem the pronounced concerns regarding the Cloud’s confidentiality, culture and uptime to be overstated. It is also true that large amounts of delicate data have dwelt in the cloud for years devoid of major security breaches. Companies who have adapted to cloud computing earlier have overcome the organizational hiccups and constituted cloud-enabling management systems. In the end, cloud models have demonstrated that they are ahead of large internal IT systems by a broad margin.