Types of Websites that can Benefit from Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is a form of web hosting that has been growing in popularity over recent years. The main advantages are cost, stability and scalability and there are various types of websites that can benefit from being hosted in the cloud. These include large websites that receive a high number of visitors, seasonal sites and growing sites.Large, High Traffic WebsitesThe major benefits of cloud hosting for high traffic sites are scalability and cost. With traffic levels high it makes it difficult to judge the amount of hosting resource that is required, particularly as high traffic sites tends to have constant fluctuations in traffic. With cloud hosting, resource is allocated towards a website as it is needed and removed when it is no longer required. Therefore, when the capacity needed is high it is available but when it is not then it is no longer paid for. The other main hosting option for large sites with high traffic levels is dedicated hosting. There are two major disadvantages to this though, the cost and the limits there are. Cost wise, dedicated hosting means paying for the maximum resource at all times regardless of whether or not this capacity is being utilised. There are always limitations with dedicated hosting. You can buy more servers as a site grows but however many servers are dedicated towards a site the capacity stops there, and if more is needed it is not available instantaneously. With cloud hosting, on the other hand, more resource is automatically allocated to a site as required without the client having to take action.Seasonal WebsitesSeasonal websites possibly benefit from cloud hosting more than others. Below are some examples of these types of sites:Travel agents who tend to have peaks in the summer and in the lead up to the school holidaysSome ecommerce sites that are particularly busy prior to ChristmasWebsites of events, for example the London 2012 website that would have been busier during the Olympic Games than prior to themThe cloud hosting benefit for these types of sites is that they can cope with the increase in traffic during peaks without paying for the same high capacity during the troughs. For example, site owners don’t want to be paying for the hosting resource required for the thousands of visitors they might get for a short period every year when they are only getting a fraction of this for the rest of the year. The London 2012 website had its problems due to the high volume of traffic when people were trying to purchase tickets for the Olympic Games. Perhaps some of the issues could have been avoided with the right web hosting. The site would have performed better if more servers had been available, as would have been the case with a cloud hosting service.Fast Growing WebsitesThe scalability of cloud hosting can make it a good option for websites that are quickly growing. Below are some examples:The websites of businesses that are growingNew businesses that are expected to grow as they are coming from nothingWebsites set up for an event where content and traffic will increase as the event nears and then even more so once it beginsThose who run the above websites might know that traffic will increase, but it may be difficult to predict the exact level of these increases. Utilising cloud hosting means the site owners won’t need to predict the traffic levels. As the popularity of the site increases the hosting resource will be automatically increased to keep pace with this. This means not having to constantly update hosting packages. Otherwise site owners may start off with basic shared hosting and gradually upgrade to dedicated hosting, and then add more dedicated servers should growth continue.The above examples are the main types of websites that can find cloud hosting advantageous. The main reasons for this is the scalability on offer and the fact that site owners have additional resource should they require it without having to pay for it unless it is being utilised.Andrew Marshall ©