What Is Cloud Hosting?

Traditional hosting sees your website leverage the power of one particular server’s CPU, RAM, storage, and data transfers. For example, shared web hosting has your website literally share resources with other sites that are also hosted exclusively on one server. The result is many annoying limitations in terms of power, and the inability to handle sharp traffic surges. For better service, you can pay for a virtual private server, or even a dedicated server of varying power. In all these cases, you’re basically relying on one server, and that’s it. However, cloud hosting kicks that single-server hosting model to the curb. With cloud hosting, your website draws resources from multiple servers.

Cloud hosting’s use of multiple servers gives it certain advantages over traditional hosting. For example, if your website experiences a sudden traffic spike, it can pull resources from another server to prevent slow page loads or, worse, the site going down. In addition, cloud hosting makes it incredibly simple for your website to scale resources up or down, as needed. With traditional hosting, you may need to move to a different hosting type (say, from shared to VPS or dedicated) in order to obtain the power that your website needs.