Cloud Hosting for Beginners

Recently the time came for Scenography the Theatre Design website to move to a new server, we were a victim of our own success, increased visitor numbers and users meant increased bandwidth and storage bills, we’ve often considered moving to a VPS or even a server of our own, but at the moment that seemed like overkill – however there is an alternative to medium to large websites needing to stretch their arms: Cloud Hosting.

Everyone wants their website to be a success, but often it comes at a cost: increased hosting bills. Unless you run your own server, rent a server or use VPS chances are you’re on a shared hosting package. For most of us these are just great, you pay small sum of money for a modest amount of bandwidth and storage, but what happens when you get too big for your web hosting plan? Well most hosts will allow you to upgrade or add extra storage and bandwidth, usually that’s a system that works out very well… but is it the most cost effective?

The way shared hosting works is that your host buys/rents a server. They then “slice” that server into chunks of storage (Packages) and sell them on to clients. When a client needs more than their package allows the host has to charge extra because the client is using storage the host could sell on to a new customer… prices sometimes seem steep because it’s not a cost effective solution and ultimately the host can only sell on space if any exists on the server.

The introduction of Cloud Hosting from a range of hosting providers has changed things significantly. Cloud hosting benefits from utilising a number of servers to provide your hosting rather than just one, and because Cloud hosting is not based on one single server, extra storage may be added at a much lower price. For example 1GB of additional space a month on SiteHQ’s Cloud will only cost you £1.

For us at Scenography it was an obvious and easy choice, we were eating both bandwidth and storage fast and needed a cost effective solution. We’ve been on the Cloud for two weeks now and I have to say so far we are very happy with both the performance of the site, the hosting control panel and SiteHQ’s excellent support service. The migration was relatively painless, the only real difficulty we had was that our database was too large to be uploaded via phpMyAdmin, however SiteHQ were more than happy to do this for us. Although we’re paying roughly the same amount per annum we’re actually getting a much better service, with both more storage space and bandwidth as default than we had on our shared hosting plan, and of course if we should need to pay for additional resources they come at only a fraction of the price!

However it’s not all about storage space and bandwidth, another great benefit to be had from hosting your site on a Cloud is that you can use multiple platforms and technologies side by side: you can use Linux and Windows 2008 on the same site, as well as PHP, ASP, PERL, PYTHON.

If you’re running a site that’s getting big, or setting up a site that you expect to expand rapidly or perhaps you have a site that often gets sudden spikes in traffic then Cloud Hosting may well be the ideal solution for you.

There are a number of Hosts offering Cloud Hosting, though I can happily recommend SiteHQ with whom  i’ve hosted both a number personal and work sites off for over five years.

Cheaper Cloud Hosting

SiteHQ’s cloud hosting just got cheaper