Traditional Web Hosting vs. Cloud Hosting: Which One is the Best For Your New Business?

If you want to grow your business, having a website is an absolute must. It is an easy and affordable way of promoting your business online.

When creating a website, you need to pick out the best web hosting plan for your needs. However, with the vast amount of choices out there, you might be confused about which choice is the best for you.

In this article, we will compare two options: traditional web hosting and cloud hosting.

Traditional Web Hosting: An Overview

Traditional web hosting is the most common way of hosting, where you rent a server to host your website. It comes in three different options: shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting.

Shared hosting is the cheapest and easiest to maintain because you are sharing server resources with other websites. All maintenance and updates are handled by the service provider. This makes shared hosting ideal for beginners and small websites.

Prices for shared hosting plans start from $3/month on basic plans ranging up to $15/month on higher plans.

VPS hosting, on the other hand, works by allocating a portion of the server to host your website. This gives you more freedom, performance, and flexibility to configure your hosting depending on your needs. Medium-sized businesses benefit from this hosting.

Because of its greater benefits, VPS hosting is more expensive than shared hosting. Basic plans start at $4/month while higher plans may cost for up to $80/month.

The most expensive and complex traditional hosting is dedicated to hosting. In this setup, you need to rent a server to host your website. All maintenance and updates should be handled by you.

On a positive note, dedicated hosting gives you total control over your server. This makes it suitable for large enterprise and corporate websites with huge monthly traffic.

Renting a dedicated server typically costs between $100 to $300 per month depending on your preferred hardware configuration.

Web hosting providers allow you to upgrade hosting anytime you want to. However, upgrading a hosting plan might be tricky. Thankfully, most of the service providers offer you assistance whenever you need to upgrade your hosting plan.

Now that you've learned the concept of traditional web hosting, let's talk about its Pros and Cons.

The Good

● It can be cheaper to operate. Traditional hosting plans can be cheaper than cloud hosting. For example, you can check hostinger.in to compare prices of traditional and cloud hosting.

● Lots of options. Traditional hosting caters to the needs of virtually every business, whether small or big. You can choose from different options according to your requirements.

● Matured technology. With decades of existence, the traditional web hosting has matured enough to deliver the desired results.

The Bad

● It heavily relies on the server. Once a server suffers failure, websites hosted on that server suffer as well.

So as you can see the raditional web hosting good for any size of business. Whether it is a small business website or a large corporate website, traditional hosting has the options to cater to your needs for a competitive price.

Cloud Hosting: A Quick Overview

Cloud hosting works like traditional hosting. However, instead of hosting your site in a single server, your website is "distributed" across multiple servers called a cluster.

Downtimes virtually do not exist on a cloud-hosted website. When a server in a cluster fails, plenty of other servers will take its place which makes your website more reliable.

When internet traffic is very high, traditional hosting suffers from a performance bottleneck. In cloud hosting, this is not the case. The are plenty of servers to handle such loads.

All of these benefits may come at a higher cost, typically from $30 to $200 a month.

The Good

● Reliable. Because there are plenty of servers hosting your site, you can guarantee a 99.9% uptime.

● Better performance. Your website will be able to handle traffic spikes without losing performance.

● Scalable. Since your site is not bound to a physical server, you can upgrade its resources without migrating.

The Bad

● Compromised security. Cloud hosting is secure. However, your files on different locations may pose a potential security breach.

As you can see the cloud hosting gives you the benefit of cloud computing in your website. It increases your site's performance and reliability. However, it may be more expensive and more complex than traditional web hosting. To fully benefit from cloud hosting, you need to have an in-depth understanding of how it works.

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So, what should you choose?

It all depends on your type of business. If you have small traffic, you don't have to pay more. A good traditional web hosting plan is sufficient. Just remember to add some resource allowance should your web traffic grow.

However, traditional web hosting may face downtime, either from server failure or traffic spikes, sometimes. Cloud hosting, on the other hand, doesn't suffer from this. So if you don't want your website to suffer downtimes, it might be a better option.