Shared Hosting vs. Cloud Hosting: How to Choose?

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Website owners from enterprise level to small and medium sized business need to choose different hosting service wisely based on their needs and budget. In the changing internet market, with various options emerging in an endless stream, it becomes a little bit confused for those website owners to decide how to find a more suitable and efficient way to manage their websites. There are mainly two outstanding and popular ways in the competitive hosting environment-shared hosting and cloud hosting, which with the similarities as well as distinguish such as server speed, storage capacity, setting knowledge, and security. Consequently, before you do the decision, you need to learn about what they are and the differences between the two hosting solutions.

What is shared hosting?

Shared hosting, the most classic and popular hosting plan, means the clients share all the resources such as data, CPU time, memory and disk space from only one server of the hosting company depending on their needs. And the users can pack as many accounts as possible on the server and only need to pay for the part of space and resources they use. Of course, for the properties, users are only allowed to manage the single part they order and the hosting company is in charge of managing, maintaining, and updating all the shared statistics.

To make it simple for understanding, let us use the dormitories as an analogy, the shared hosting is just like a dormitory, in there, you live with your roommates and share all the resources including the power, water, space even the unwelcomed voice made by others. It is affordable and you have the dormitories wardens even the department keepers to manage all the resources but possibly, the space is limited and you will be effected by others.

What is cloud hosting?

Cloud hosting, allows clients to use the resources from multiple servers simultaneously, rather than a single server location. That means you will be arranged to comparatively  superior servers to avoid the overload of your website during the high traffic or traffic spikes.

This can ensure your website can open and respond speedily. Besides, if one server goes offline, or if other shared websites has been hacked, there will be no effect on the availability of the website since it is like an independent host part in a group of clusters. Finally, you can manage websites by yourself since you will have access to setting up those tools or functions as you need. But the premise is that you have enough technology knowledge about the website.

Also making an analogy, cloud hosting is just like you rent a house for yourself only. You do not need to share the space in your house and will not effected by other people in another house. You have the rights to use and arrange facilities in your house , but you will still share the water, electric and other public space of the whole building.

Similarities and differences between shared hosting and cloud hosting

Comparing the two hosting services, no absolute superiority but most suitable point for you exists, and you can choose what you really need based on bellow comparison:

a. Space & Resources: As mentioned before, shared hosting has limited space and resources which will depend on the amount of online users. While cloud hosting can be allocated the relatively abundant space and resources since they are from more different servers.

However, within resources from multiple servers does not represent you will have unlimited and dedicated resources in the hosting service, you also need to share with other hosting services.

b. Root Access: For cloud hosting, you have the root access to installed or set up some tools in the website, but for shared hosting, you need to ask hosting company to help you on not all but some of them. So it depends on if you need the full priorities and if you have the setting technical knowledge.

c. Security Guarantee: Both the shared hosting and cloud hosting have no securities guarantee since they will share the space and resources from the server and if one user is hacked, other users may be effected.

d. Price: The price is based on the products themselves. Usually, the price of shared hosting will be much cheaper than cloud hosting. For shared hosting, the company will arrange the established package in advance. But the price for cloud hosting is more flexible since clients can choose the exact service they need instead of being arranged some additional or unnecessary service.

In conclusion, for those new small or medium sized business, shared hosting will be more suitable because of not only the resources but also the budgets; for those enterprise level business, they can choose cloud hosting due to enough resources and rapid speed to handle high traffic and properties to control the website.