Dedicated hosting vs Cloud hosting

[BudgetVM-Winnie]

Is dedicated hosting cheaper in the long run compared to cloud hosting? Which one should I opt for when hosting high traffic sites?

 

[ITivan80]

Cloud hosting is where the company runs your website or service on a server with other web sites or services. You generally get no control over the server itself; you get to upload files and administer the service, but the hardware and OS is the host's responsibility. Dedicated Server hosting is where the host rents you a complete server in their data center. They provide the hardware and OS, internet connection and bandwidth. You are responsible for whatever else you choose to install and run.

 

[BudgetVM-Winnie]

Cloud hosting is where the company runs your website or service on a server with other web sites or services. You generally get no control over the server itself; you get to upload files and administer the service, but the hardware and OS is the host's responsibility. Dedicated Server hosting is where the host rents you a complete server in their data center. They provide the hardware and OS, internet connection and bandwidth. You are responsible for whatever else you choose to install and run.

Thanks. Suppose I have the right technical expertise in configuring everything from the ground up, which is the cheaper of the two? Would you vouch for Cloud or dedicated hosting?

 

[John @ S4]

The problem is that most of the terms used by different hosting companies are not very exact in meaning. They all have a definition you can look up, but whether the individual company is strictly following those definitions or making their own interpretation is a different thing. Nowhere is this more true than with the terms 'cloud' or 'shared', they can mean vastly different things depending on who is applying them.

The best thing to do is to not start out with a decision that you need a specific kind of hosting, but to identify what your actual needs are.

• How much traffic are you expecting?
• What are you going to be running, resource intensive apps, or just serving static pages?
• Do you need a specific OS?
• Do you need high availability and failover?
• Do you want to split your resources over multiple separate server instances, i.e. a separate database server?
• and etc. and etc.

Talk to potential hosts with that list of what you want to build, what the expected traffic is, and see what they propose. There truly is no one size (or type) fits all solution.

 

[HostColor]

"Dedicated Hosting" coulee either a "physical dedicated server" or a "cloud dedicated server". the difference between these two is the use of virtualization technology. If the data and apps are hosted on an OS installed on a bare-metal server, then it is considered a "Dedicated Server". If they are hosted on a virtualized server, that resides on top of a Cloud computing system, then it is a "dedicated cloud server". There are also virtual servers (VPS or VMs) that reside on a stand-alone physical server. These cannot be defined as a "Cloud".

 

[scottweb]

If you have high traffic on you site and you have right technical person who can deal with all the configuration stuff then you should go for dedicated server. If you need high resources, dedicated server will be cheaper then cloud servers. In case, you don't want to do all the technical stuff and want one-click deployment, then you should go for cloud servers. Cloud server provider can help you to deploy your application on their cloud and can handle some level of the security stuff too.

 

[Aayushi]

Dedicated Hosting:
You can use Dedicated Hosting if your website has high traffic and sensitive data. It is exclusive and does not share with anyone, and It provides an in-house functionality, but the providers own, manage, and operate it. It gives you hardware, operating system, and control panel choices. It allows clients the flexibility of customers, the server to the client for unique needs of CPU, RAM, RAID, Hard Disk, OS choice, CPanel choice, etc.

Cloud Hosting:
Cloud hosting easily manages high traffic, and it is flexible and scalable. It allows you to raise or reduce your resources per your business growth and pay accordingly. Cloud hosting is your best choice if you are looking for reliable hosting services.

Dedicated hosting is not cheaper than cloud hosting, but Dedicated hosting provides more resources and services than cloud hosting, so Dedicated Hosting is suitable for your High traffic website.

 

[NetRay]

Pros of shared hosting
The main advantages of this service

Low cost. Shared hosting, in most cases, will cost much less than any other type of hosting.

The site owner does not need to configure the server (the one with the closet) himself. The server will already have everything necessary for the operation of most CMS software installed.

Free technical support. Most hosters provide free support to shared hosting clients.

Free automatic backups. Decent hosters create and store backup copies of your data on remote servers so that in the event of a server breakdown, it remains possible to restore them.

Cons of shared hosting
Limited resources. Usually, the shared hosting tariff implies severe restrictions on the use of not only the disk space of the server, but also its processor, RAM and channel. Often these resources become scarce even for a site that is not very visited. If you systematically exceed the limits, those support may ask you to change the tariff to a more expensive one, or simply disable your account (depending on the hoster).

Inability to change server settings. Some specific content management systems require you to install or disable some PHP extensions, or change the configuration of Apache or Nginx. On a shared hosting, you cannot do this, and the support service most likely will not help you. After all, if they change the settings of the working server, then this may negatively affect the sites of other clients.

"Neighbours" on the server. In most cases, all those hundreds of sites that are hosted on the same server as your project will be assigned the same IP address. This, according to some reports, can negatively affect the ranking of your site by search engines. For example, if your "neighbors" will place malware or other dirty tricks on their sites.

Pros of cloud hosting
Fault tolerance. The high uptime of cloud hosting is due to the fact that if one server is unavailable (falls), all the others continue to process requests. In such a situation, all sites hosted on this cloud will continue to work normally.

Scalability. In the case of cloud hosting, there is no need to change tariff plans depending on the growth of your site's popularity. Even if attendance increases by several orders of magnitude in 1 day.

Automatic backups. As in the case of shared hosting, most normal hosting providers back up data hosted in the cloud to remote servers.

Payment for actually consumed power. There is no need to overpay for a powerful processor or a large amount of RAM, if your site does not run powerful scripts or there is no influx of visitors. This is the same as in the case of utility bills, if you do not use water (for example, for religious reasons), then you will not have to pay for it.

Cons of cloud hosting
Price. In order to create and maintain such a fault-tolerant and scalable system, the hosting provider spends a lot of money. This cannot but affect the final cost for the user. In addition, if you hang an unoptimized (for some reason, consuming high power) script on cloud hosting or someone hacks your site, then there is a huge chance that you will be unpleasantly surprised by the size of the invoice issued by the hoster.

 

[brijeshm]

Do you have a qualified technical person on staff who can perform all the configuration tasks? If yes, you should choose a dedicated server.

A cloud server is the best option if you don't want to deal with the technical details and want one-click setup.

 

[ughosting]

If you take dedicated server hardware, when you outgrow this you will have to configure a 2nd server or migrate to a larger server, if you have taken a cloud server, you should be able to have that cloud server resized, which often only requires a reboot to complete.
Cloud servers are more expensive, but they are more reliable as if the physical server they are running on fails, the virtual image is then loaded on another physical server and the services restored in minutes.
You can can often clone these servers and perform snapshot backups, which is more difficult to do with physical servers.
Remember that 2 servers means 2 lots of licensing for your control panels and website builders and backup systems etc.
If you purchase large servers to create reseller and shared hosting accounts, you really ought to purchase cloudlinux to isolate the tenants from one another, a few miscreants may use all of your resources.

 

[ownwebserver]

Dedicated hosting and cloud hosting are two popular types of web hosting, and they have some key differences.

Dedicated hosting is a type of web hosting where a single physical server is dedicated to hosting one client's websites or applications. Dedicated hosting provides high performance, security, and control, as the resources of the server are not shared with other clients. Dedicated hosting is ideal for websites and applications that require high performance, have high traffic, or require specific hardware or software configurations.

Cloud hosting, on the other hand, is a type of web hosting that uses a network of interconnected virtual servers to provide hosting services. With cloud hosting, resources are dynamically allocated and distributed across the network of servers, providing scalability and high availability. Cloud hosting is ideal for websites and applications that have fluctuating traffic, require high availability and scalability, or need to handle sudden traffic spikes.