One often has to make a choice when it comes to website hosting. You weigh the variables and decide on the best solution for your hosting needs. Cloud hosting makes this decision a WHOLE lot easier. Let’s break it down.
Price. You want to get the best deal possible. Shared hosting probably comes to mind first. In the classic sense, shared hosting means a company has a server, and they load as many websites onto this server in order to make the most profit from one server. Sometimes, this can mean hundreds of websites on one box. One box… susceptible to the same physical hardware limitations as any other server. Sure, they might even include RAID, redundant power supplies, and a lot of disk space.
However, what happens when your website actually starts getting traffic? I had an experience where my company put their trust in a shared hosting company (*cough* Dreamhost *cough*). When it came down to it, one of our websites had a lot of visitors one evening, and after battling to keep things running smoothly, the host ultimately disabled our website via renaming the index file to index.php_disabled_by_host. Seriously? So much for saving money and “unlimited” space and bandwidth… which brings me to my next point.
Scalability. If you have a website that has outgrown shared hosting, what is your next move? Many people consider purchasing dedicated equipment for their website. A dedicated server is usually the first move. Not enough? Scaling out from this point then usually requires the purchase of another dedicated server and a load balancer, then it just gets pricier from there with a dedicated database server, file servers, caching servers, and more to handle growing traffic and load. We’re talking a significant amount of expenses just to get the ability to scale.
Scale My Site is the answer. The concept of a cloud host is that it takes the best of the scalable, dedicated world and lets you just pay for what you use. You put your website in the cloud and instantly your application is scaled across multiple webservers. Your files are stored on a redundant SAN mirrored across many physical drives. Database queries are performed on powerful, multi-node database clusters. You don’t have to think about “how am I going to handle all of that traffic?” because it just happens automatically. You no longer have to think about “do I need a Windows or Linux based account?”. It doesn’t matter. You can run ASP.NET applications side-by-side PHP web sites. It’s the cloud that doesn’t mind – it’s cool with whatever you want to do. I highly recommend checking out Ninja Systems, the cloud hosting company, if you are serious about scaling your website, and if you don’t want to waste your time recreating another scalable infrastructure that you need to manage yourself.