Once you’ve decided you want to build a website, hosting is the next thing that comes into the picture. Now, you might be building your website from scratch or you may already have a flourishing one. Needless to say, just because you’ve chosen a particular hosting for your website doesn’t mean you need to stick to it forever. There might be times, you will have to either change your hosting plan or the type of hosting entirely. This decision depends on the type of website you run and the amount of traffic your website receives.
For our scope, we will be looking at two types of hosting viz. Cloud Hosting and Dedicated Server. In this article, we will walk you through what Cloud Hosting is, as well as, Dedicated Server, their differences and which one should you opt for.
Let us begin with understanding both these types of hosting options:
Cloud Hosting:
Cloud Hosting is a hosting option that connects several physical servers to each other via a common network, eventually forming one large network. In Cloud Hosting, your server resources like RAM, CPU, and disk space are distributed between the servers. One prime benefit of Cloud Hosting is that it is easily scalable i.e you can add more CPU and RAM space to your server easily.
Cloud Hosting is ideal for growing and large businesses that are looking for scalability, performance, speed and security.
Dedicated Server:
Dedicated Server is a type of hosting where your website is hosted on an entire physical server. Here your server resources like CPU, RAM and disk space, are not divided with any other website. Along with this, with Dedicated Server, you get full root access of your server granting you total autonomy and administrative control of your server.
With Dedicated Server you can easily scale your website resources as and when you need them. This hosting option is ideal for large businesses with ever-increasing website traffic to ensure ultimate performance, instant server provisioning and speed.
3 Major Differences Between Cloud Hosting and Dedicated Server
- Customisation and Control
The prime feature that sets apart Cloud Hosting and Dedicated Server is the customisation and control it offers to the websites hosted.
In Cloud Hosting, your server resources are shared with the websites sharing your server space. Although this doesn’t hamper your website performance as you can easily scale your resources on the go, what it does imply is that you don’t have complete control of your server and resources.
In Dedicated Server, you get complete administrative control of your server. Moreover, you get the entire server to yourself, so you can easily customise your server based on your website needs. Here you can install any additional software if needed or modify server resources as and when required.
- Sharing of Resources
In Cloud Hosting, you get access to a section of the server space where the resources are shared with various other customers.
In Dedicated Server, all your resources are commissioned for your business alone without the need of you sharing them with other customers.
- Cost Affordability
Although both Cloud Hosting and Dedicated Servers are priced on the high end of the payment spectrum owing to their prime features, there is still a difference.
Cloud Hosting is priced slightly cheaper because essentially you don’t use the entire server and its resources. Based on your website traffic, you can scale your resources which ultimately affect your pricing.
Dedicated Server, on the other hand, is costlier as the entire physical server is yours. Moreover, with Dedicated Servers, you have to upgrade not only your given server resources but also the additional resources you may have installed, the software licensing fees etc. Overall, this increases the cost of your Dedicated Server.
The Deciding Factors
Cloud Hosting is the best choice for you if:
- You are a small to midsize growing business
- Your website traffic falls under the range >25k and <50k visitors/day
- Your website has dynamic content
Dedicated Hosting is the best choice for you if:
- You are an established or large business
- Your website traffic falls under the range >5L visitors/day
- Your website deals with sensitive and huge amount of data
Which is the Right One for Me?
Irrespective of the differences between Cloud Hosting and Dedicated Server, both hosting types are good depending on your business type and website traffic
With Cloud Hosting you can leave the server management to your service provider and take care of establishing your growing business. Whereas, the same thing may not hold true if you’re a large business dealing with sensitive data and might prefer your own team to manage your server.
In the end, the choice of hosting primarily depends on what you are looking for, your website traffic, your budget and nature of business. At HostGator India, we offer both Cloud Hosting and Dedicated Hosting. Do check out our plans depending on your website requirements.
If you have any suggestions or queries, feel free to post them in the comments section below!
