Hosting Battles – Cloud Hosting Vs. Dedicated Hosting

There is a wide variety of hosting options available today. In this post, we will try to clear the air around two popular hosting choices, Cloud Hosting and Dedicated Hosting so that you are in a position to evaluate the features and qualities of these two and understand which of them is right for your website or application.

As a matter of fact, both the hosting types, Cloud and Dedicated Hosting will be in a position to support any type of application and service. But each of them has certain features which are best suited for certain scenarios. It all boils down to understanding your needs and requirements and evaluating which hosting type and its features align well with your business .

Let’s begin by defining what Cloud Hosting and Dedicated Hosting are.

Cloud Hosting: Cloud hosting is a virtualized server hosting platform where each server is a virtual machine that runs on a powerful enterprise-grade bare metal server. In Cloud Hosting the resources needed to host a website are divided and distributed across multiple servers in the cloud. This enables easy scalability and better reliability as any single point of failure is redundant.

The primary benefit of Cloud Hosting lies in Virtualization. Since each virtual server is a software construct, it can be programmed like any other software. That being said, a virtual server can be created or destroyed in seconds. Therefore it can be given more resources as required. It can be destroyed immediately when no longer needed, making Cloud Hosting very responsive to business needs.

Dedicated Hosting: Unlike Cloud Hosting, all the resources of a Dedicated Server are available to the client. A Dedicated Server can be configured to meet the requirements of a client in terms of specifications such as the processor, RAM, storage etc.

Dedicated servers are the most powerful single-server hosting option ideal for hosting many websites or a single high-traffic website. The only hosting option more powerful than a dedicated server is a cluster of Dedicated Servers.

Performance: In terms of performance, both Cloud Hosting and Dedicated Hosting provide high performance. Dedicated Hosting, can at times outperform Cloud Hosting because none of the resources are shared. However, there is something called “dirty” instance in the case of dedicated servers. Don’t be scared, this is a family friendly post 🙂 What it refers to is that sometimes computers tend to slow down in performance owing to too many unwanted program files and temp files running on the server. This can happen in Cloud Hosting too but you have the ability to switch to a new instance leaving a “dirty” instance behind, cleaning up that machine without interrupting things, and then moving back to the same machine in a hassle-free manner.

Reliability: Cloud Hosting is known for high reliability. This is because of the overall structure of Cloud Hosting. Since data is stored and pulled from multiple machines on the cloud, even if one of the server crashes unexpectedly, your website won’t be affected as the crashed server will be replaced by another server in the Cloud instantaneously. This cannot be said for Dedicated Hosting. Even though the hosting providers will ensure you will have 99.99% uptime, in the case of disaster or server failure, there’s no arrangement of a backup server kicking in, and your website goes down until the server is repaired, and gets up-and-running again.

Cost: Dedicated Hosting is the most expensive type of hosting. This is of course justified because you get huge amount of resources all for yourself. In Cloud Hosting, the resource distribution across the cloud makes it a lot more affordable. Moreover, in certain Cloud Hosting Packages, you are charged only for the amount of resources you utilize. That is, you pay for what you use and keep it simple. Cloud Hosting ranges between $10 to $20 per month and Dedicated Hosting may go up to the range of $90 to $180 per month.

There you have it, this should give you some idea to begin the evaluation process. Taking into consideration the features of each hosting type and your website’s needs, you can narrow down on the perfect hosting plan for your website. Hope this helps and if the readers have any opinion on the matter, I would like to hear about it in the comments section below!