Cloud web hosting: Things to consider

By Ragu. Posted on 25 June 2011.

Cloud hosting and Advantages

Web hosting, traditionally is operating your website on single server. In the age of cloud computing, web hosting is operating your website on multiple servers where you can add servers to multiply processing power and it proves to be more scalable and cost efficient.

The barriers for website expansions are lesser with its scalability and it offers a crash free environment. It has scalability options when your business is growing bigger and you want to scale up without a genius brain at a lower cost. Also, its pay for the usage and faster fulfilment of website requests features stress us to switch to cloud web hosting. There was a time when people spent a lot of money to get a website created by professionals but now anybody can create as cloud hosting offers free website builder tools. You may try Weebly, Yola, Jimbo, Webs, uCoz, Wix, and other web hosting and creation sites. Any service needs a disaster recovery plan except for cloud which offers service with rare outages. In a few years, cloud web hosting will replace traditional web hosting completely.

Cloud hosting over web hosting

Dedicated web hosting provides customers a private server which is not shared by others. Reseller hosting offers the account holder to use their hard drive space and bandwidth to host websites from third parties. Cloud hosting is completely virtual and offers shared sources, and software and other tools available on demand. As you pay only for what you need, it brings your cost of operation extremely down.

Cloud hosting providers, web building tools and their pricing structure

First know your web design and hosting charges and compare the same services offered by cloud providers, you will definitely go for the cloud, does not matter, you are an entreprise or an individual. Most of the cloud services offer free services for static pages developed and hosted with them. You will pay for the service when you add videos, feeds, flash files, photo galleries, google maps, audio players, slideshows and other multimedia supplies. You can either select a flat monthly fee or pay-as-you-go to subscribe for the service. Usually, the providers offer lesser monthly fee when you sign for longer contracts. Some of them take one-off payment for the length of contract.

You need to check if your cloud hosting provider provides website building tools and how effective they are. The best thing to do is try their tools for free before you pay and publish it. Also, check if they provide you an easy control panel to make the most out of it.

Uptime and OS support

It does not matter the provider is a giant, outages occur. You need to ensure your provider promises 99.9% uptimes and compensates when that threshold is not met. Cloud hosting does not have preferences to run its website software on any operating systems or platforms.

Technical support

Cloud offers a great service but still need to face technical issues rarely. You need to make sure the provider offers a 24/7 support and discuss with them about the service level agreement.

Experience as a factor

Cloud computing is an emerging technology. It has thousands of start up companies. You need to be careful to select somebody experienced enough to handle the issues. You need to think of how Google and Amazon handled their recent outages.

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