A question that keeps getting asked on the internet a few thousand times every month is this, what is the difference between web hosting and cloud hosting? We actually do understand why people will ask this question and will like to provide a good answer that will satisfy the urge of most readers.
What is Web Hosting?
This is an internet service that allows people, businesses, organizations, and governments to build websites that are accessible over the internet.
The most popular type of hosting package that is available is the shared hosting package which is often advertised by lots of web hosting companies as unlimited hosting. To be honest, though, we will like to break it to you that unlimited web hosting doesn’t exist. We will break this down for you in another post in the future.
Web Hosting Services
With web hosting, you should expect some services to be bundled in your package irrespective of the type of hosting package you choose.
Email Hosting
Email Hosting refers to the ability to have your emails hosted on the same servers as your web hosting package. You get to have custom email addresses with your domain name.
The thing with hosting Emails on the same server as you have your website is that it adds to the server load and can impact your hosting experience especially if you get a fairly large amount of traffic and a good email workload.
It is often advised that you do your email hosting outside your web hosting package with companies like Google, Outlook, and Zoho.
Other web hosts will not directly tell you this but they infer it by adding one-click integration with email hosting solutions outside of their service.
DNS Mapping
Your web hosting package will also normally come with DNS mapping as this is what maps your readable links to IP addresses where the corresponding service is located. If you do not know much about editing DNS, reach out to your web host to provide the needed support.
Most web hosts will have a knowledge base or support for changes you need to make to your DNS Map.
SSL
In this age where internet security has a minimum expectation of admins having at least a free SSL certificate attached to each website, hosting service packages are expected to come with a one-click button to integrate popular free SSL providers for their customers.
Backups
Like Email hosting, backups do add to the server load but are a very important part of your security strategy. You can always connect with your hosting company to understand how server-level backups affect your hosting plan and ascertain if it is a great option for you.
What is Cloud Hosting?
Cloud hosting is a type of web hosting package that offers increased reliability and redundancy. Cloud hosting services sell you a portion of a cloud hosting infrastructure through virtualization. With cloud hosting, you can get a virtualized resource off multiple fail-safe servers with redundant storage arrays (if a disk or a server breaks in the backend, the cloud server itself is redundant and does not break, and continues to work).
This delivers a robust cloud hosting experience. Cloud servers are virtual servers that are hosted in the backend (there are hypervisor physical hardware servers you do not have to even think about because they are fully managed).
Not all cloud and virtual servers are the same. As with shared web hosting servers, most hosting companies fill up their servers way too much with too many sites and take too much traffic impacting performance and slowing down the site load times.
Difference Between Web Hosting and Cloud Hosting
While traditional web hosting has to do with resources being deployed from a physical server, the main advantage and difference that cloud hosting offers are being able to offer scalable, redundant, and failsafe resources. Your websites will have lesser downtime because once, as support would say, “one of the servers in the cluster is down”.
Cloud hosting is always redundant unlike many VPS hosts out there. A different server from the cluster can keep the cloud server running and disks breaking won’t break your cloud server disk because, in most cloud server backends, the large high-performance disk arrays can keep running when one or even a couple of disks die in most cases.
When a failure happens, it’s unknown to you but a technician gets notified by the system and the issue gets fixed without any cloud server failure.
Our Director, Andre Brongniart had this to say about Cloud hosting when we asked him.
“Plesk panel is ideal for cloud hosting because of its high performance with nginx and has a plethora of features for ease of use including site management tools, security checks, scans, and server heuristics.
Unlike cPanel and other competitors, the Plesk Cloud hosting plans allow you to manage to add or remove as many users to the plan you want to collaborate with.”
It also gets interesting with the added bonus
“As an added bonus, Reseller cloud plans are only $5 extra on top of the Cloud hosting plans and allows the owner to separate each client into its own hosting space as well.”
If you have multiple clients as a web admin, you will definitely be able to make the best use of our reseller packages as you can but a big reseller plan and make each of your clients have a separate hosting panel access.
