Cloud Hosting vs Shared Hosting : What are the Differences?

There are many different types of web hosting, and it’s easy to get them confused. For most individuals and small companies, shared hosting is the most common and most economical.

Shared hosting simply means that your web hosting provider places multiple web sites on a single server. This does not mean that other companies whose web sites are on the same server as yours will have access—on the contrary, access is tightly regulated and password controlled. You, and everybody else, will have a password-regulated interface to your site, and it will appear to you as though your web site is the only thing there.

Unless you have an extremely large web site with high traffic and specialized requirements, chances are, you do not need an entire dedicated server just for your own use, and the shared model is the most efficient way to go.

Cloud hosting uses the same concept and is in reality just another type of shared hosting, but with greater upwards and downwards scalability. One issue with shared hosting is that within the context of a single server, there is a fixed amount of physical space. Although the hosting provider will provision their servers in such a way that you don’t run into capacity problems, the issue still remains. Cloud hosting removes that possibility by replacing the concept of the individual physical server, with that of a virtualized and highly scalable infrastructure.

Think of the “cloud” as a giant server with unlimited capacity. Several physical servers are interconnected and virtualized, so that the physical boundaries that exist between actual machines becomes irrelevant. Your web site is no longer resident on a single server, it is resident on a “cloud” of servers, and can therefore tap into the cumulative space and power of all of them instead of just a single one.

Because of the virtualization technology that is used in the cloud, the provider is able to offer a hosting service that is much more scalable in both directions, so that you can take advantage of capacity on an as-needed basis, in much the same way as a utility.