What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting is when you run your application or website on virtual servers in the cloud. Traditionally, organizations hosted applications on physical servers purchased in on-premises data centers or hired from hosting providers. In cloud hosting, you pay a cloud provider to host your application across a network of physical and virtual servers spanning diverse geographic locations. This method is much more flexible than traditional ones. You access computing resources from an existing resource pool and can scale your applications up or down very quickly. And you don’t have to worry about provisioning the right amount of resources.

Cloud hosting works because of a technology called virtualization that runs multiple virtual servers on a single physical server. Each virtual machine (VM) has a fixed pool of resources—like memory, storage, and CPU—to draw from. They can each run independently to other virtual machines on the same physical server.

As each virtual machine is isolated, you can deploy different applications and servers on them without worrying about interference or compatibility. If one VM experiences a spike in traffic, it can pull more resources from the pool to stabilize performance. 

Cloud hosting providers lease out the virtual servers to customers to access as required. Depending on their demand, the cloud host allocates multiple virtual machines and resources to them. With this highly flexible system, organizations can quickly deploy new VMs, allocate more computing power to an existing one, or adapt IT infrastructure as required.

Cloud hosting uses virtualization to create a highly effective and scalable yet isolated system. Cloud hosting customers enlist the remote servers to access resources, store and manage data, and use services and applications from the cloud hosting provider.

Read about virtualization »

There are four main types of cloud hosting architecture, each of which allocates resources differently and requires varying amounts of input from your organization.

Public cloud

Public cloud infrastructure is when a third-party provider manages all underlying hardware, computing resources, maintenance, and availability. You don't need to buy or own any of your own servers. You rent virtualized resources alongside other businesses, which are logically isolated but run on shared hardware.

Private cloud

A private cloud is a cloud computing environment dedicated to a single organization. In a private cloud, all resources, such as CPU and storage, are isolated and under the control of one organization. A private cloud typically runs on dedicated servers and hardware. You can have a private cloud on-premises or with a cloud provider.

Hybrid cloud

A hybrid cloud is IT infrastructure that blends both public and private clouds. Hybrid cloud allows you to keep dedicated environments for compliance or latency-sensitive reasons, and combine them with public cloud components to take advantage of the benefits of public cloud infrastructure.

Cloud hosting is a flexible method that your organization can use to access resources without a huge upfront cost. This method comes with many benefits for companies that work with a cloud partner.

Scalability

The flexibility of cloud hosting ensures that you always match your resources to demand. Your cloud hosting provider can allocate you more or fewer resources as you need them. You don’t have to buy new servers and install and maintain them upfront, and instead you only pay for more resources when you scale. Similarly, you don’t pay for cloud services that you don’t use when your system is idle.

Availability

Many cloud hosting providers have data centers all over the globe, which reduces latency and increases availability. They have additional failover mechanisms to protect their services. Cloud hosting companies also invest in technology like load balancers and content delivery networks to ensure customers can access highly available services and applications. These companies make sure that your applications are highly available and accessible by users in all geographical regions worldwide.

Cost efficiency

The biggest cost to local hosting is investing in new hardware and its required infrastructure. Even after this upfront cost, you still have to pay for ongoing maintenance, which can be costly. Cloud hosting offers pay-as-you-go systems and eliminates the need for maintenance costs.

Security

Cloud providers heavily invest in robust security systems and offer high-level security for all of their customers. The provider updates and patches their systems, so they’re always up-to-date with the most recent security frameworks. Their attention to security also allows them to offer a range of disaster recovery options. Top cloud hosting service providers include additional data backup and recovery mechanisms you can use as an add-on capability.

Time to market

Organizations that begin to construct their IT infrastructure must wait to set up physical hardware, test it, then deploy their new environments. Using cloud environments, you can integrate new technologies and shorten development cycles. When you use cloud hosting, you can significantly speed up your time to market.

Web hosting is a service that stores your website or web application and makes it easily accessible across different devices, such as desktops, mobiles, and tablets. The web hosting service provider maintains, configures, and runs physical servers that you can rent for your files.

Cloud hosting offers web hosting as a service, with the traditional web hosting service model (dedicated self-managed), a virtualization model (self-managed), or a serverless model (managed). Although cloud hosting offers web hosting services, web hosting doesn't necessarily involve cloud computing.

VPS hosting vs. cloud hosting

VPS hosting is where one physical server in a data center hosts many virtualized servers with dedicated resources, each for different customers. Each different virtualized environment has access to dedicated resources for a single customer. Virtual private servers typically offer fixed resourcing per VM.

Unlike VPS hosting, cloud hosting offers a range of different, flexible architecture models. Although you can choose VPS cloud hosting, you can also add cloud hosting servers or change types, or use serverless cloud hosting. This makes cloud hosting solutions much more flexible than traditional VPS.

Dedicated hosting vs. cloud hosting

Dedicated hosting is where you use a physical, dedicated, single server. You rent a dedicated physical server and become the only customer that has access to that server. These servers might or might not come pre-installed with virtualization. Customers choose dedicated hosting when they must not share any resources with other users. However, dedicated servers come with a high cost. With dedicated hardware, you have full control over the physical infrastructure and can configure your websites and applications (sometimes across multiple servers) to meet your exact needs.

You don't have to choose between dedicated or cloud hosting because most cloud hosting offers dedicated hosting options for customers, for full flexibility in services. The pay-as-you-go billing method for dedicated cloud servers is more financially flexible than purchasing dedicated servers. With this configuration, you can create an optimal environment without owning the base server.

Shared hosting vs. cloud hosting

Shared hosting is where many businesses or websites share one server with one operating system and all its resources, including web server software. Because you share these resources with other customers, it will be slower than other types of hosting. However, you pay less for shared hosting, which is much more affordable than other types of hosting.

Cloud hosting does not offer a shared hosting model, instead using virtualization to give customers their own space. Because you don't need to share resources with others, it's a more powerful form of hosting.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers cloud hosting solutions for organizations of all sizes. With AWS, start-ups, small and midsize businesses (SMBs), enterprises, nonprofits, and government organizations can deliver their websites and applications in the best way to suit their business.

AWS provides a wide range of modern cloud hosting plans for websites, ecommerce, web apps, and all types of applications.

Here are some AWS services you can use for cloud hosting today:

• Amazon EC2 provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. You can use it to host enterprise and other application-heavy websites.
• AWS Lambda is a serverless app hosting service that handles all infrastructure management, enabling faster development, improved computing power performance, enhanced security, and cost efficiency.
• Amazon Lightsail is a streamlined way to launch and manage a web server using AWS. Lightsail includes everything you need to start your website at a low, predictable price.
• Amazon S3 with Amazon CloudFront provides cloud storage options with a content delivery network for highly affordable static website hosting.
• AWS Amplify Hosting is a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) and hosting service for static websites and server-side-rendered web applications. It's scalable and fully managed.

Get started with AWS cloud hosting by creating a free account today.