Small Business Web Hosting

The Pros and Cons of Public Cloud Hosting

Below we dive into what public cloud hosting actually is, along with its advantages and disadvantages, so you can make the best decision for your business.

Public cloud hosting utilizes the resources of a large network of physical servers to provide a virtualized hosting environment that’s fast, flexible, and instantly scalable.

The main way that public cloud hosting differs from private cloud hosting is that a public cloud provides hosting to multiple clients within the same shared physical server infrastructure. The only overlap you’ll have with other sites are the physical servers themselves. Each virtual network will still be isolated from one another.

Although this seems similar to traditional shared hosting it differs in its approach to utilizing the physical server space. Public cloud hosting draws from so many different physical servers that the space and resources you have access to are theoretically infinite and you won’t suffer any lags in performance from other sites who happen to be using the same physical server resources.

Utilizing public cloud hosting offers your website a ton of benefits that are hard to find in other kinds of hosting. Below we look at a few of the biggest reasons you’ll want to consider using public cloud hosting:

• Scalability. Public clouds offer near infinite scalability. Resources can be increased on demand to meet growing site or traffic requirements. Flexible pricing. With public cloud hosting you share the cost of the physical server environment. Plus, you generally have a flexible pricing structure that’s only based on the resources you consume. The pricing model is similar to that of paying for your monthly utilities.
• Extremely reliable. Due to the high number of servers and networks involved in creating a cloud hosting environment, when a single server fails or becomes overloaded your site can simply draw resources from another server. This will greatly help to prevent any downtime or lapses in service.
• High performance. Public cloud hosts are naturally high performing, as you’ll have access to a nearly unlimited amount of server resources.

Of course, as with any style of hosting there will be certain drawbacks. For example, with a public cloud host, your data will be quite secure, but not as secure as a private cloud host. Also, since your data is spread widely across multiple different virtual server environments the chances of this data being compromised also increase. Although scaling with public cloud hosting is quite easy you may want to eventually upgrade to a dedicated or managed server if your traffic levels are high enough. A public cloud can handle large amounts of traffic, but you may get improved performance and control with a dedicated server. Finally, with public cloud hosting, you’ll get less control over the specifications of your server environment. If you require a unique hosting hardware and software configuration, then this may not be able to be supported by public cloud hosting.