While the term cloud hosting has taken on a momentum of its own, and there seems to be an air of inevitability surrounding it, perhaps it would be wise to step back a moment and consider the major differences between cloud hosting and the traditional web hosting, in its many forms that we have grown accustomed to.
While everyone is looking to see what the clouds can do for them, the conventional line is that cloud computing will make downtime a thing of the past, make available unlimited server resources, and ultimately be a lot less expensive than the web hosting we use now. There is also the question of server security to examine. Let’s look at each of those.
Downtime – Yes, with server redundancy all over the planet clouds will likely make pure downtime a distant memory. On the other hand, depending on multiple servers from who knows where can lead to slower loading times, particularly with server intensive applications, like email. These days, when speed is becoming more and more important to the search engines, I would think twice before compromising your capabilities in this regard.
Unlimited Resources – This is the true selling point behind the clouds. The idea that your site will never be subject to spikes in demand, and subsequent server crashes, is a very attractive notion. Anyone who’s ever had a server crash during a product launch will tell you they’d have paid any amount to avoid that. So, this is a legitimate concern. You need to balance this feature against the load time issues to get a real picture of whether or not this may be worth it to you.
Pricing – Cloud hosting clients pay a flat fee, then an additional amount is tacked on based on time and resource usage. So, it’s difficult to nail down an exact monthly cost. You pay for what you use, as you go. Traditional web hosting is based on “plans”, which allocate a set number of resources to you. Go over your limits, you can expect to be throttled or shut down. You do have the opportunity to upgrade, and in fact most hosts would love this. It’s not without fuss, however, and you might experience some downtime, or a slowdown.
Security – This one is not talked about much, as so far data is insufficient to determine if the clouds are really the security nightmares many have been thinking they are. I would just say that until these issues are resolved, I would opt for a dedicated server on a traditional web hosting plan if security is crucial to your business. Better safe than sorry!
There seems to be a lot of potential with cloud hosting. The watchword of the day would at this time be Proceed with Caution! In tenuous economic times such as these, it’s no time to be alienating clients or customers.
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