Cloud hosting is a very flexible option that allows you to adjust your hosting plan quickly and easily in response to your changing needs. The technology behind cloud hosting allows us to have a cheap, reliable and scalable architecture. The processing power of the Cloud is unlimited because we can add servers and resources to the Cloud as often as necessary. If you expect reliability, scalability and redundancy for your website and applications, a Cloud Hosting plan can be a perfect choice.

Some of the reasons as to why you should enter cloud and ditch your dedicated server??

Deployment Time

To deploy a cloud server is very quick and easy. Simply select the server type and the software you require and within a few minutes your entire Cloud Server is deployed, configured and ready for use. Servers can be brought up & destroyed in a matter of minutes. However, to deploy a dedicated server it requires a lot of time and work. Hardware must be selected, hard drives, memory, and networking equipment must be installed.Then software and applications need to be installed, updated and configured. This may take days or weeks and the level of complexity is too high.

Pay As You Go

Cloud Servers are charged by the hour and you will only be billed for the resource you use. Your business can save money by only paying for what you used, while at the same time benefiting from a reliable, stable hosting plan. However, a dedicated server requires a setup fee or some sort of monthly/yearly contract. Suppose if you want to deploy a new server for some testing, you will have to pay for the server longer than you need it.

Scalability

It is easy to vertically scale your cloud server by simply selecting the amount of resources you want to give to the Cloud Server. You can easily add or remove computing power, memory & hard drive space. As your applications grow, you can add storage, RAM and CPU capacity as needed. This means you can buy “just enough” and scale as the application demands grow. With traditional dedicated servers adding and removing resources can be very challenging, take a long time and cause downtime while your server is being modified.

Server redundancy

Cloud servers have full redundancy. In case the host server fails, the cloud server instantly restarts on a new host within seconds of failure, effectively decreasing downtime and increasing redundancy. One of the benefits of a private cloud deployment is that you can get automatic failover between hardware platforms to bring up your server set in a separate data center when your primary data center experience an outage. Dedicated servers rarely have any redundancy in place. Any power, network or hardware failure could come with long expensive downtime, unless you pay much more for redundancy.

Disaster Recovery

If your cloud server fails and is unrecoverable, you can simply power on the cloud server backup image. Your cloud server will be back and running in a few minutes. One-Click snapshot backups are stored in multiple physical sites. If your dedicated server fails and is unrecoverable, you will need to reinstall OS, restore files and databases from backups which can take many hours.

All the tools needed to manage the cloud server is available in all the webhost providers site. Firewall, private networking, backup, restoration , monitoring & scaling can be easily performed from within your browser. These features do not require any additional charge except for any harddisk storage. However, for dedicated servers , every additional service is charged and requires a contract.

However, the dedicated servers excels in some areas, mainly in server pricing. The price of the cloud server is 20-30% more than the dedicated server when comparing the same performance. As Cloud being a new technology, it has to be researched and improved which makes it more expensive. Another area is security and privacy. Some users may not be comfortable handling their data to third party providers.

Even though it has few drawbacks, the strong benefits of cloud meets the specific needs of clients. It is an upcoming technology that delivers flexibility, high-performance, scalability and reliability.

About the Author :

Irene Mary Thomas works as a Software Engineer in Bobcares. She loves reading books and listening to music in her free time.