Cloud Hosting vs. Shared Hosting, What's The Difference?

People have been asking us for advice on where they should host their website. Should they go for shared hosting or cloud hosting?

What is shared hosting?

Shared hosting allows multiple websites to share one server. Exactly how many websites can share it depends on your hosting provider and package. It can be hundreds of websites on a single server which is why the price for shared hosting can go really low.

The price is what makes it so attractive. Shared hosting is the cheapest hosting option you can have which is good for startups, small sites and those with a limited budget.

Disadvantages of shared hosting

Although the cheap price tag sounds good, it comes with a few drawbacks.

• It comes with limited resources - Since you’re sharing the server with other websites, it means you will also be sharing the resources—CPU, RAM, mail server and others. It is shared on demand by the websites on the server which is not sufficient if your site suddenly gets high traffic. The server might get overloaded and cause your site to stop.

• It can slow down your site – This stems from having limited resources. Even if your site doesn’t get that much traffic and other websites on the server are, then their request for resources can cause your own website to load slow and affect its performance.

• It is not secure – You can’t choose which websites to share servers with. If one of them isn’t keeping up with security updates and their site gets infected with malware, that malware might attack the server and infect the whole network of websites on that server, yours included.

What cloud hosting is and why we choose it.

We usually recommend cloud hosting for all of our client’s websites. Here’s why.

• Resources can easily be scaled up or down - Unlike typical server configurations where you are constrained by the limits of the server your site is hosted on, cloud hosting can pull resources from a network of different servers. You can quickly scale it up or down depending on what your website needs and when you need it.

• It is safe and secure – With cloud hosting, your website will be in a completely different host instance from other sites (your software won’t be connected to other websites). This means your site can’t get infected by another website on the server that’s not up-to-date with security gets infected by malware.Cloud hosting also offers automatic updates on software and server upgrades which help keep your site safe and secure.

• Your business won’t be affected by frequent downtimes – System failure and other disasters can lead to downtimes which in turn lead to productivity and revenue loss.

Because cloud hosting ensures your site is backed up and protected, you can quickly access your data in times of power failure and other crisis and allows you to continue conducting your business as usual.

These are the reasons why we recommend cloud hosting for all of our clients’ websites. We also make sure that we only set up very small clusters of websites and that all of them are sites we personally look after.

We monitor all the websites we handle every single month, checking their performance to make sure that if any does need more resources, we can easily, within a matter of minutes, scale up and provide more resources to that website to make sure it stays stable.

If you have any questions about hosting, feel free to ask us at [email protected]. We can also check your website, review how it is performing and give recommendations on how you can improve it further.