‘Cloud’ is definitely the biggest buzzword in the computing world these days, and while those who are tech savvy will know all about it, even the best of them may not know all of its potential applications. Cloud hosting, for example, is an alternative to having websites hosted on shared hosting or dedicated servers. Often times it’s not easy to determine what type of server is the best fit, choosing from the three main options - Shared Hosting / Dedicated Server Hosting / Cloud or Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting. Shared hosting is by far the most common option for small businesses and individuals, and here at 4GoodHosting we’re like most Canadian web hosting providers in that most of our customers get by just fine with shared hosting plans. They consist of many websites hosted on a single server, and they offer extremely good value for money. A website on shared hosting can handle up to 30,000 visitors per month, and that’s usually no more than most sites will need. Shared hosting also has the advantage of being very simple to set up, making it ideal for the beginner or non-technical user. The packages typically will come with unlimited bandwidth as well. Dedicated server hosting is quite different, with a single server hosting the website(s) or application(s) of a single user. The dedicated server’s advantage is that the entire server is geared for optimum performance because you have the entirety of it to yourself. Yes, dedicated hosting can be expensive, but that vast amount of processing power means it’s worth the expense if fast page-load times, a dedicated IP, and the ability to handle a lot of traffic – as many as 100,000 visitors per month - are important to you. In addition, dedicated servers are very secure and will allow multiple IPs for services that need to be kept separate. Moving on to cloud hosting, also known as virtual private server (VPS) hosting, we can say it’s probably the most difficult to describe of the three. To summarize it, it’s like having access to nearly unlimited resources and you access as many or as few of them as you...
