The pandemic gave businesses that previously eschewed the Internet little choice but to go online. It’s where the customers went, so businesses had to follow them there. For many businesses, it meant a mad scramble to get a handle on a whole lot of technologies they had minimal or no experience using before.
More than a few businesses picked services based on how fast those services could get a website up and running. With the initial mad pace over and more experience under their belts, many businesses are now in the process of looking at options like dedicated vs cloud hosting for their business sites.
If you’re wondering which is right for your business, keep reading for a quick look at what they are and their respective benefits.
What Is Dedicated Server Hosting?
The natural starting place for most businesses is shared hosting. Essentially, your site shares space and resources on a server with lots of other sites. For sites with low or moderate traffic, that works out okay.
Once your site reaches a certain traffic level, though, the limitations on shared hosting become obvious. That’s when you look at something like a dedicated server.
That’s when a hosting company, such as esited.com, allocates an entire server and all of its resources to your website.
Dedicated Hosting Benefits
Dedicated hosting offers a number of benefits. They typically let your site load faster because no other site can hog resources like the available bandwidth. You also avoid problems like your site going down because another site on the server is suffering from a dedicated denial of service attack.
What is Cloud Hosting?
Cloud hosting takes a completely different approach to hosting. Rather than get a physical server, you get a virtual server. Essentially, the software acts like a physical server that allocates your website resources.
In practice, though, the data for your site doesn’t sit on a single server. Instead, that data sits on a number of servers. Essentially, multiple servers share the work of hosting your site and serving it up to visitors.
Cloud Hosting Benefits
In the cloud vs dedicated hosting debate, cloud hosting typically provides most of the same benefits as dedicated hosting. You also get one or two extra benefits.
Cloud hosting is a scalable service, where dedicated hosting is limited by the hardware of the server. Cloud services can also avoid downtime by keeping your data in multiple data centers and not just on the server in a single data center.
Dedicated Vs Cloud and You
For the business owner, the dedicated vs cloud question can feel a little obscure. They offer similar kinds of benefits, such as improved speed and fewer problems from other websites on the server.
Depending on the service, they are often comparable in pricing. The big difference is the scaling. If you think your website will experience massive traffic growth or substantially increase in size, the scalability of cloud hosting may serve you better.
Looking for more website tips? Check out the Website posts in our Technology section.
