Cloud vs. Shared hosting. What do you need to know?

07.05.2019 1,564 4

Martin Pramatarov

We have already talked about the technologies behind the two – cloud computing and virtualization. Now let’s take a different turn and see it from the perspective of a customer who wants to host their site. Which one should he or she choose – cloud or shared hosting?

Cloud hosting

It combines resources from different servers. This can benefit the customer by providing better uptime. If one of the servers is down, the rest can still function properly. That is very handy for bigger websites, like e-commerce sites, which must stay online all the time, not missing out on sales because of server issues.

Another great benefit, apart from the resilience, is the better performance. This depends a lot on your choice of cloud, but generally speaking, cloud hosting is better.

Cloud hosting has better security. Usually, the connection to your cloud hosting will be encrypted. These plans also usually include DDoS protection.

The biggest disadvantage, as you could have guessed already is the price. This is the biggest reason why new companies prefer to start on shared hosting and move to cloud hosting in their growth phase.

Shared hosting

If the client decides to choose a shared hosting plan, he or she will use a part of 1 particular server. On the same server, there will be more sites of other hosted clients. You can imagine that in this situation you will share all of the resources of the server, including bandwidth, storage, and CPUs.

The first advantage is the price, of course. It is a good option for small sites with not so many visits per day.

Depending on your plan, you might be able to host more than one website.

Disadvantages – worse performance.

You will be dependent on the rest of the sites on the same server. If they are getting a lot of traffic your site will suffer. If one of the sites hosted on the server gets a strong DDoS attack, that could mean downtime for all of the hosted sites.

Cloud vs. shared hosting final decision

Actually, the decision is very easy. If you have a small site, for example, a portfolio website with a few pictures and contact information, you can go with shared hosting. It will save you money and provide a decent service.

And for all the rest, who need excellent performance and no downtime, go with the cloud hosting. It will surely be superior.