Cloud Hosting has been around for a while now and is growing in popularity, but there are still some misconceptions about what it entails. In this blog, we’ll explain what cloud hosting is compared to the “old-fashioned” version: hosting on hardware.
What is cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting has become an indispensable part of the Internet industry, but how do you tell someone what it is exactly? Well, we’ve come up with a fun comparison:
Cloud Hosting can be compared to carpooling. The passengers are the websites and the cars are the servers. If five lightly packed passengers each drive their own car to the same destination, a lot of space is lost. They can also choose to share one car, this way less space is lost and you can divide the costs. It sounds a bit short-sighted – to stick with car terms – but that’s more or less how cloud hosting works as well.
Hosting on multiple servers makes it a lot easier to scale up and down when a site gets busier or less popular. However, there is a misconception about this. Just because it is easier does not mean it is automatic. Nor does it mean that Cloud Hosting is the best option for every site.
Different types of cloud hosting
There is a difference between shared and VPS packages. With shared packages, you share your server with other people, making it more economical. But servers can also be divided into smaller virtual private servers (VPS), on which individual websites are hosted. This is useful if your site gets a lot of visitors, is growing or fluctuating in visitors. This way, your capacity is less dependent on the data used by someone else on the shared server.
A virtual “own” server for your site is therefore a lot more reliable, but not more economical. At Savvii’s web hosting, we offer both solutions.
What is Hardware Hosting
Hardware Hosting is a lot easier to explain. Hosting on hardware is seen as the “old fashioned” way of hosting. There is a lot less automation. A site buys a physical space on a server from a hosting company. This server can be divided into small parts, but not in the virtual way as with cloud hosting. Instead, the servers are physically divided up. This way, multiple sites can still use the same server to save costs but the division is not virtual. Making the sites completely independent of each other.
At Savvii, this means that we can help our clients with problems a lot faster because we maintain the hardware ourselves. Hosting on hardware may be seen as old-school, but for many shops it can also have advantages.
If we go back to the carpool comparison, this could be explained very well. Sharing one car with several people is convenient if each passenger is lightly packed. However, as soon as one of these passengers is carrying a lot of heavy luggage, this is also a disadvantage for the others: the car becomes heavier, slower and uses more fuel. As soon as there are several passengers with very heavy luggage, the car might not be able to cope with the weight at all.
It works the same way with hosting. The heavier and more complex a site is, the more demands it makes on the hardware. Take Magento shops as an example. Magento needs a lot of disk i/o, which means the program has to request and deliver a lot of information to or from a physical disk. This can be done a lot more efficiently on hardware than on cloud.
Of course there’s a lot more to it in real life than we can tell you. But we would like to point out that there is no one-size-fits-all answer for every site.
Fortunately, at Savvii we have a wide range of products. So there is always a suitable solution for every website or webshop.
Also need tailor-made advice? Contact us to discuss the possibilities!
Want to read more about this topic? Then read our next blog: Cloud hosting & Hardware hosting: The differences.
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