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Dedicated Hosting vs. Cloud Hosting

There are many web hosting options and two of these are dedicated hosting and cloud hosting. There are advantages and disadvantages to both and these are outlined below.

Dedicated hosting is where a web server is entirely dedicated to your website and, unlike shared hosting, isn’t shared with other websites. With your website being the only one on a server it prevents the problem of other sites having an impact on yours.

With cloud hosting you can make use of several servers as required. These are available as and when you need them. Rather than having a physical server (or more than one) that you are paying for all of the time, you use the resources you require at any particular time and pay accordingly. This means that should you suddenly require more resource you can use it, but without paying for it when you are not using it. Essentially, you pay for what you are using at any particular time.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Dedicated Hosting

The main advantage of dedicated hosting is that you are not sharing servers with other websites. This means the entire resource of the server is dedicated to your site. For example, bandwidth for the server is not shared amongst other websites. The lack of other sites makes dedicated hosting very reliable. Unlike shared hosting, problems with other sites cannot impact you. Dedicated hosting can be pricey, though, compared with other forms of hosting as it often means website owners are paying for resources they don’t require. Dedicated hosting is a good option for websites where traffic is consistently high. The bandwidth of dedicated hosting may be required and if traffic is steady it is easier to decide how much resource is needed.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Cloud Hosting

Paying for what you use is an obvious benefit. Cloud hosting means having extra resource available to you but not having to pay for it all of the time. Cloud hosting is beneficial for growing businesses. It allows them to easily adapt their hosting as they require more resource. Websites with fluctuating traffic can also benefit. It means having the option to use extra server space when traffic is high but without having to pay for it when traffic is low. Seasonal businesses, for example those who are particularly busy at Christmas or during the summer, are amongst those who should consider cloud hosting. With several servers being used cloud hosting can increase reliability. The overall load is balanced across different servers, meaning less reliability on one server. There are obvious advantages to cloud hosting but also some downsides. Unlike with dedicated hosting, you don’t have access to a server. This means being dependant on third-party providers and having less control. Though improving, security can also be an issue, with websites being more vulnerable to hackers.

Dedicated Hosting or Cloud Hosting?

Different options are suitable to different websites. Dedicated hosting might be preferable for established websites or those which are highly sensitive, while cloud hosting can be the better option for sites where traffic fluctuates or is expected to increase over time.

Andrew Marshall ©

Is Free Web Hosting Worth it?

The web is full of free web hosting options. So why should you go with a service that is going to cost you a monthly fee when you could go for the free alternative? While there surely are a few good free web hosts out there, by and large it’s a situation of you get what you pay for. And since you don’t pay for anything, your experience is likely to be horrible.

Stability

Sure, there are hundreds, if not thousands of free web hosting sites. But you won’t have heard of any one of them. Free web hosts, it turns out, don’t last long. They pop up and then disappear rapidly, taking whatever data was uploaded with them. This means that there isn’t any level of reliability from free web hosts.

Uptime

Uptime is the measure of how much time a site spends running and serving pages to viewers and how much it spends down, doing nothing. Even free web hosting sites that manage to stick around lack decent uptime. Their services crash on a regular basis, making it quite difficult for anyone interested in your content to actually view what you’ve made, especially once you start to see an increase in traffic.

People don’t like it when their expectations go unmet. So being faced with a website that won’t load is a bit like running into a brick wall: quite unpleasant, and you can be sure they will steer clear next time.

Tight Restrictions

Because free web hosting sites are operating on a constrained budget, each site gets a tiny slice of an already constrained pie. With a free host, getting less than a Gigabyte of storage space is standard, and monthly transfers are usually limited to less than a Gigabyte of data. This means that if your site ever gets any real traffic, your site will stall. Traffic builds up fast, and you’ll never know when your site is about to use up your monthly allotment of transfer.

Shady Business Practices

But the biggest reason to steer clear of free web hosting? Most tend to have shady business practices.

Where does the money come to run the free web hosting company come from? The only two real revenue sources are a freemium model and ads. A freemium model goes for the upsell, trying to convince people to pay money for the hosting. Usually this means that the free service is nearly useless so you have to pay eventually.

But ads are even more troublesome. Often free hosts support themselves by having popup ads or banners that get forcibly inserted into your site. Advertising on your site that you do not benefit from is ridiculous and unprofessional. Popups are particularly annoying, if for no other reason than that we remember the early 2000’s when popups were the bane of the internet.

Free web hosting companies could also be using your site to collect personal information from your users, without your knowledge.

If you are going to run a site, there are cheap web hosting services out there. You are going to have to pay for something, one way or another. If you go with a free host, you still need a domain name to point to it, and those cost money. Often pay hosting plans include a domain name.

Is Free Web Hosting Worth it?

The web is full of free web hosting options. So why should you go with a service that is going to cost you a monthly fee when you could go for the free alternative? While there surely are a few good free web hosts out there, by and large it’s a situation of you get what you pay for. And since you don’t pay for anything, your experience is likely to be horrible.

Stability

Sure, there are hundreds, if not thousands of free web hosting sites. But you won’t have heard of any one of them. Free web hosts, it turns out, don’t last long. They pop up and then disappear rapidly, taking whatever data was uploaded with them. This means that there isn’t any level of reliability from free web hosts.

Uptime

Uptime is the measure of how much time a site spends running and serving pages to viewers and how much it spends down, doing nothing. Even free web hosting sites that manage to stick around lack decent uptime. Their services crash on a regular basis, making it quite difficult for anyone interested in your content to actually view what you’ve made, especially once you start to see an increase in traffic.

People don’t like it when their expectations go unmet. So being faced with a website that won’t load is a bit like running into a brick wall: quite unpleasant, and you can be sure they will steer clear next time.

Tight Restrictions

Because free web hosting sites are operating on a constrained budget, each site gets a tiny slice of an already constrained pie. With a free host, getting less than a Gigabyte of storage space is standard, and monthly transfers are usually limited to less than a Gigabyte of data. This means that if your site ever gets any real traffic, your site will stall. Traffic builds up fast, and you’ll never know when your site is about to use up your monthly allotment of transfer.

Shady Business Practices

But the biggest reason to steer clear of free web hosting? Most tend to have shady business practices.

Where does the money come to run the free web hosting company come from? The only two real revenue sources are a freemium model and ads. A freemium model goes for the upsell, trying to convince people to pay money for the hosting. Usually this means that the free service is nearly useless so you have to pay eventually.

But ads are even more troublesome. Often free hosts support themselves by having popup ads or banners that get forcibly inserted into your site. Advertising on your site that you do not benefit from is ridiculous and unprofessional. Popups are particularly annoying, if for no other reason than that we remember the early 2000’s when popups were the bane of the internet.

Free web hosting companies could also be using your site to collect personal information from your users, without your knowledge.

If you are going to run a site, there are cheap web hosting services out there. You are going to have to pay for something, one way or another. If you go with a free host, you still need a domain name to point to it, and those cost money. Often pay hosting plans include a domain name.