The Differences Between Shared Versus Cloud Hosting

Published September 17, 2021
cloud hosting for faster content delivery

With the advent of cloud hosting, many businesses have shifted to this model. However, there are many small businesses that still use shared hosting. This blog post will discuss how the two options differ so that you can make an informed choice when choosing a hosting service for your business.

Pricing

When discussing the differences between cloud hosting and shared hosting, you can’t afford to miss out on the most major factor of all: price. Shared web hosting is significantly cheaper than cloud hosting because it offers a much lower level of service.

Less price means you won’t get any bonuses like free domain registration or free email addresses, but if your website doesn’t have much traffic or require many visitors to function properly, this shouldn’t be an issue for you.

What’s more, shared web hosting doesn’t cost much, and any business can easily afford it. If you use the very basic service offered by shared hosting, it can give you access to minimal services that might be initially sufficient for your business. However, if you want more features or need a bit more storage space, expect the price to increase significantly.

When you purchase cloud hosting, you need a much bigger budget. This is because it offers much more bandwidth and storage space than shared hosting. Unlike shared hosting, pricing can be very unpredictable when using cloud hosts. This is because they offer many different products with varying levels of service and performance. Some may offer better bandwidth, while others provide free domain name services — it all depends on your service provider.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is one of the main benefits of cloud hosting, as you get a lot more than with shared web hosting (which is why it usually costs more). To start with, cloud hosting offers unlimited bandwidth. This means that you won’t have any limits on the amount of data that your site can process or how many users can access your website. This is not the case for shared web hosting because they usually limit each account to a certain number of TB (terabytes) each month. If you go above this amount without upgrading, your site will either malfunction or be inaccessible until the end of the month.

Faster Connectivity

Another difference between cloud hosting and shared web hosting is that cloud hosting provides faster connectivity than shared hosting. This doesn’t mean you’ll get more visitors, just that your page won’t take as long to load for you or your visitors. This is because your content will be on a server that’s much closer to your user’s location (as opposed to being hosted in the same place as hundreds of other user accounts). Also, if you want to use video streaming on your site (for example, through YouTube or Vimeo), cloud hosting offers much better support for video files than shared hosting does.

Security

One thing to keep in mind about shared hosting is that security is a big issue. Since it’s not managed by the host itself, you’ll have to rely on the provider’s hiring a security team and their servers to keep your site safe. This is because if your server isn’t protected, you may fall victim to hackers or other malicious individuals who want to exploit your site for their own purposes. However, this shouldn’t be of too much concern if you’re starting off a new website or developing it at a slow pace. The more advanced features, like server control, will only be accessible through custom-made applications, which can usually be installed by the provider (also known as cPanel and WHM). Although there are exceptions, these kinds of web hosts usually only offer basic support that’s not offered by the average provider.

When you purchase cloud hosting, you get an expert or second-level support team who are available at all times and will help you solve any problems you may have. There’s a very minimal security risk involved, and your data is generally safe. In fact, most providers have 24/7 customer service and can help with problems as soon as they arise.

The Bottom Line

Many people will also opt for a higher-level service when comparing shared web hosting with cloud hosting, as you get more control, more features, and more reliability with cloud hosting. While this is true, you will have to pay a lot more for these perks. If you’re only looking for basic service and don’t really need to have control over your web host’s server configuration, then shared hosting is perfect for you. Only purchase cloud hosting if you have a good budget, and you want faster speeds and faster content delivery.

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