Written by Xuan Luan for I-Net Dynamics
Cloud has undeniably grown more and more popular in recent years. Big names like Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Google provide many products and services on the cloud. Among them, one core service you may come across along your exploration of the cloud is cloud hosting.
What Is Cloud Hosting?
Traditionally, for hosting, organizations have to invest in their physical data center, and their applications and tools are deployed in this single physical server.
Cloud hosting is not a tangible physical product, but it’s how you configure your servers and then deploy your products. Now with cloud hosting, your applications and tools can be deployed to the cloud and accessible via the Internet. From a user’s perspective, you may find no difference. However, your business now can take advantage of a powerful network of servers. How much you want to tap into the resources is all up to your needs of scalability, availability, and so on.
How Does Cloud Hosting Work?
As explained above, instead of the traditional single server model, cloud hosting ensures that your applications and solutions are deployed in a cloud network, not the on-premises server.
Cloud providers have their network of physical servers, which then implement a huge network of virtualized servers. For most businesses, this is a nearly limitless supply of resources, including computing power, data storage, and other integrated services up to their demand at a reasonable cost.
Benefits of Cloud Hosting
1. Flexibility and Scalability
With physical servers, traditional hosting models are limited in its bandwidth. Cloud-hosted solutions can adapt to traffic demands easily and quickly. It can be scaled to meet high-season needs without the hassle of investing in physical resources or server reconfiguration.
With a network of clustered virtualized servers, your solution can easily tap into more cloud resources whenever you need and then release them when they are no longer needed.
2. Cost Efficiency with Flexible Pricing Model
Similar to many current cloud services, you can use the resources on a pay-as-you-go basis. With this pricing structure, you should be able to monitor and then predict your usage more accurately. It then may help you with cost planning for your business.
3. Reliability and Availability
Your traditional hosting websites are dependent on your physical servers, which undoubtedly are subject to downtime, disaster, and security risks.
Cloud hosting has a high-availability feature built into its architecture. Using top-quality services from big players like Microsoft and Amazon guarantees that you have access to the most reliable and secure network.
Your applications are no longer subject to a single point of hardware failures. Once a server goes down, plenty of other servers come in to do the job. Moreover, the data is also backed up and secured. Traffics travel across secured interfaces.
4. Fairly Easy and Speedy Implementation
You can now deploy a cloud hosting server in record time. For example, developers can easily use Azure Portal to deploy their websites on the cloud within a few clicks.
For organizations and businesses, there are more things in considerations; however, with the help of reputable providers, the general setup process is considerably faster and smoother than the long way of setting up physical servers.
5. Safety and Security
Similar to the point of reliability, with cloud hosting, you are no longer subject to your physical server issues including hacking, hardware failure, or system overload.
Moreover, cloud providers like Microsoft Azure guarantee one of the highest security standards for their products and services. Thus, using these resources means that at least your hosting platform is much more secure than your physical server, which you may not be able to invest and implement crucial security practices.
6. Easy Management and Monitoring
Now everything about your cloud-hosted solutions can be monitored and managed easily via management dashboards, for example, Azure portal gives you a fairly easy and intuitive view, where you can understand and manage your applications without a deep technical requirement.
Also, Azure offers many other services such as business and analytics, which you can quickly integrate with your cloud-hosted solutions for a whole better performance and experience.
With a brief overview of cloud hosting, hopefully, you can have more information to find a suitable solution to your business. To have a deeper look into it and how to best apply it for your business, please contact us for reputable cloud hosting services.
