What is Cloud Hosting? Advantages and Disadvantages :

The benefits and drawbacks of being on the cloud :

Cloud hosting , for those of you who haven’t heard already, is a specific type of hosting which utilizes a vast network of servers, which are interconnected in a way which provides vast resources to many users. For the users themselves, storing their data and running their programs on the cloud can have lots of advantages and disadvantages at the same time, so making the choice is going to be hard. Read more about that below.

There were times when cloud computing was mentioned not quite as often as it is today. But things have been changing a lot since then, and even the direst of skeptics were assured of the efficiency of cloud computing. Now, more than ever, people are looking for cloud hosts to solve their most common problems.

Let’s examine the benefits of cloud computing :

• You pay for what you use, nothing less, nothing more. This is a specific characteristic of the cloud, which can handle a lot more demands than just yours, and can adjust to a higher demand without the necessity for reconfiguration and additional hardware.

• Cloud hosting can handle traffic spikes, which used to be the white whale of regular hosting when a particular site became too popular for its server to handle all of the user requests.

• Less space needs to be taken in your office for maintaining the servers you once needed to store your data and service your company’s internal needs.

• In addition to the former point, less staff is needed to maintain them, which means that your IT experts will now have time to focus on helping people around the office, or doing something that also needs their attention, instead of maintaining the servers.

• In general, cloud computing offers better uptime than standalone hosting, due to the enormous heaps of computers used.

Clearly there are lots of benefits , but to give you a realistic standpoint on cloud computing and whether or not you should use it, let’s examine the drawbacks too:

• You don’t have root access, meaning that it will be less flexible in terms of rights management and control. This is what often annoys administrators of normal networks when faced with cloud computing.

• It’s a relatively new concept and bugs are not so well-explored.

• Being a new type of service, it’s also offered by far less companies, and thus is quite more expensive, making it unsuitable for smaller companies.

Cloud computing is just getting started, but there’s a high probability that it’s going to become the most used technology in the future. If that turns out to be right, those who have tried it will have more experience than others.