By BloggerKhan

My profession is Management and Marketing and it revolves around outsourcing, ecommerce and marketing on the internet. Wise men say identify what you are passionate about and then see if ...

Review & Comparison of Cloud Hosting Providers

Cloud Hosting is a web hosting service delivered from a group of connected servers. Resources shared include processing power, storage, memory and bandwidth.

Cloud Hosting Providers build large data centers in several parts of the world (or at least the larger ones) with a lot of redundancies. They then lease out their hardware to companies big and small on a usage or metered basis. Let’s
say your business signs up with a cloud hosting provider and you request a certain number of compute cycles or processing power, storage, memory and bandwidth. The cloud hosting provider will start billing you for that many
resources. Now your marketing campaign kicks in successfully and all of a sudden you have a traffic spike and your website is getting overloaded. You simply request your provider for additional processing power and bandwidth. They provide you the additional resources and adjust your bill accordingly.

If this extra load was only seasonal and you don’t need the additional resources after three months, simply ask your provider to adjust the resources. They will do that and your monthly bill will go down accordingly. You basically
pay for metered services. You get good scalability – that is you can increase or decrease resources as and when needed. You don’t need to have a massive data center if you won’t need that much computing power for an extended period. Additional resources can be deployed almost instantly. The cloud can handle
traffic spikes.

Companies that do business globally replicate their websites in several parts of the world. That way, their websites are very responsive and customers don’t have to contend with trans-continental slowdowns. The challenge then is
synchronizing the databases across several data centers. Here again, cloud hosting providers come to the rescue as they have the resources to house and  synchronize the databases. Since they do it for several large companies, the
costs are spread out over several users. Users have a better response time, companies extend their reach at a lower cost and cloud hosting providers do good business by being the intermediary or facilitator. Win-Win-Win.

There are some disadvantages to Cloud Hosting though. One is loss of control. These resources are not in house and while they are at your disposal, they are owned by somebody else. Another is potential weakening of security. While all kinds of safety and security precautions are taken, there is still that element of uncertainty as you don’t have total control.

Cloud Hosting is not for the small business / home business as quite often they don’t have the technical resources to handle the complexity of cloud hosting. You need to have some in-house expertise to set your company up on a
cloud platform.

There are lots of companies offering Cloud hosting today. It is a bit difficult and time consuming to compare one to the other. We have tried to do some of the legwork for you. The following comparison will make it easier for you to make a better more informed decision when opting for a cloud hosting provider.

Note:

• Some cloud hosting providers have even higher tiers.

• You can also ask for a custom plan if none of the available plans fit your requirements.