Hosting Battles: Cloud Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting

From being a novelty to becoming an indispensable tool of business, websites have come a long way. As websites and their needs have evolved over time, so have the web hosting platforms. New platforms like Cloud Server Hosting have joined the old favorites like Dedicated Server Hosting. These two offer almost comparable performances but differ in many crucial ways that make them ideal for specific websites.

So should you buy Cloud Hosting or try Dedicated Hosting? What exactly are the differences that will help you decide between the two? Before we look at the differences between Dedicated Servers and Cloud Hosting in India, let us understand each of these web hosting types.

What is Cloud Hosting?

In the Cloud Server Hosting setup, multiple servers host your website data and assure data security with redundancy. Cloud Hosting uses powerful, enterprise-grade hardware to drive performance. It is resilient, scalable, and flexible.

What is Dedicated Hosting?

The Dedicated Hosting architecture reserves the entire server for one website and hosts only one site at a time. This gives it immense flexibility in terms of hardware and software customizations. You can set up your hosting server to your exact specifications.

Here are the key differences between the two.

1. Cost

Dedicated Hosting is the more expensive hosting platform between the two. Cloud Server providers can offer more competitive rates due to economies of resource scalability, whereas you pay for an entire server in Dedicated Hosting. Cloud Hosting allows you to buy a basic set of resources as per your needs and scale up when needed, but with a Dedicated Server, you pay for the whole thing regardless of your usage. The cost factor makes web Cloud Hosting more suited for medium to large websites that do not want to compromise on performance.

2. Performance

Both these hosting platforms offer high performance and are neck and neck in terms of speed. Dedicated Hosting seems to hold an upper hand here with its exclusive resources, but Cloud Hosting catches up with its scalability and flexibility. Cloud Hosting can quickly scale up to handle any sudden spikes in traffic. Dedicated Hosting can scale easily too, but needs more time and effort to match up. It gives Cloud Hosting an advantage over dedicated hosting when it comes to resource scalability and the eventual performance.

3. Reliability

Reliability is an important metric of your website’s performance. An unreliable website quickly loses its users. Cloud Hosting offers high reliability because it harnesses multiple servers to host websites. If one server fails, there are others that can step in to keep the website functioning. A Dedicated Server can be a reliable platform with regular maintenance. But if anything goes wrong with the server, there is nothing to fall back on, which lowers its reliability factor slightly.

4. Scalability

Cloud Hosting offers more scalability than Dedicated Hosting. It can add more resources on-demand to handle unexpected surges in traffic. Since it uses multiple servers to host the site data, it can call upon more resources from these servers. A Dedicated Server, on the other hand, needs to be physically upgraded to scale up.

Your choice of the hosting platform depends entirely upon the type of your website and its unique requirements. A website that needs more privacy can opt for Dedicated Hosting, and a website that wants more resource scalability should choose Cloud Hosting.