Nowadays cloud computing is the talk of the town. Every technology has a different advantage for different applications & use case scenario. No doubt cloud is a very good technological advancement, But how much it is advantageous for a web hosting? Let’s see the differences between Regular computing infrastructure & Cloud computing infrastructure and understand them from a web hosting perspective…
Basic Infrasture:
Traditional hosting infrastructure:
In a traditional hosting, a physical server is used to host multiple websites. In case of shared hosting, multiple websites share the same server. When a server reaches its capacity, a new server needs to be installed and it goes on. With a lot of servers, management becomes a tedious task.
Cloud hosting infrastructure:
For a small example, let’s assume we have 4 quad-core processors. 4, 1 TB hard discs and 8, 4 GB RAM modules. In a cloud-based based system, the cloud will consider all the 4 quad-core processor as a single 16 core processor. Out of these 16 cores, you may request and use the number of cores needed to you. Similarly, it will consider a single 4 TB hard disk and one 32 GB RAM. So we don’t need to manage separate servers with different processors, hard disc and RAM modules. A cloud system will manage all of them as a single large pool of resources, which makes management and maintenance easy. And a cloud server may use needed resources from this pool.
So the cloud server pulls its computing resources from an extensive underlying network of physical web servers. Basically, it’s a sharing of resources. The core idea of cloud computing is sharing a large amount of computing resources is among a wide user base, But because of a large amount of resources at its disposal, it becomes quite redundant and efficient (Its highly unlikely that all the resources in a cloud will fail or get overloaded at simultaneously).
Performance:
Let’s understand the limitation of a traditional hosting with a practical example. Let’s say a hosting company has 4 servers for shared hosting, each with 1 processor core and 1 RAM, with 100 websites hosted on each server. Let’s assume load on server 1 increases beyond its normal capacity at a point in time. Now server 1 will become slow because of overload while other 3 servers are still underutilized (It’s highly unlikely that all 4 servers will get overloaded at the same time). Now let’s see how cloud hosting infrastructure will manage.
In cloud hosting, if the load on 1 processor orb RAM increases, it may utilize other unutilized processors or RAM modules. Thus it will handle the load without increasing the hardware. This way a cloud hosting may provide better efficiency and performance.
What is better for me !!
A well managed shared hosting server normally works fine for a low to medium traffic website. But in a shared hosting, resources provided per website is always limited so that the shared hosting server can serve all the websites and one single website could not end eating up all the resources. Though the resources provided per website in a shared hosting is always enough for a medium traffic website, if your website is getting a lot of traffic and you are feeling that the website is getting slow, considering a cloud hosting will be a good idea. For a small or mid traffic website, a shared hosting is more than enough.