Cloud Hosting Advantages and Disadvantages

We will look at some of the key cloud hosting advantages and disadvantages, including some or the dangers - whether real or perceived - of hosting your data in the cloud. So, let’s get into some of the pros and cons.

Cloud hosting advantages

Scalability

The key advantage of cloud hosting over the technologies that preceded it and the current alternatives is the ease of scalability. Hosting in the cloud opens up the possibility for your infrastructure to encompass multiple servers to provide extra capacity. This allows for the flexibility to scale up quickly to deal with unexpected traffic surges, but also to create an infrastructure that can grow with your requirements over a longer period.

Better performance

For the reasons mentioned above that cloud hosting offers greater scalability, it also offers better performance. That’s because in addition to the increased capacity leading to increased availability for your customers, it also allows for load balancing across multiple servers. The end result is less strain on any one server and better user experience for everyone.

Reduced costs

Cloud hosting can remove the need for you to buy, house and maintain your own hardware, which reduces capital expenditure. And the ease with which you can scale up or down means you don’t have to pay for unused capacity.

Disaster recovery

Another cloud hosting advantage is that is makes disaster recovery much easier, especially if you're already using a multi-server hosting architecture.

Cloud hosting disadvantages

Security

If you and your web host are following best practice, the security risks associated with cloud hosting are minimal. That said, some organisations feel more secure knowing that all their data is within a metal box that they can put their hands on. A private cloud is usually the sensible compromise in these circumstances.

Downtime

This is dependent on the type of cloud hosting your choose but certainly for cloud hosting firms that are perhaps resellers or not particularly thorough in their setup, downtime can be an issue.

Accessibility

Since your web hosting infrastructure is in the cloud, your access to your data is dependent on internet access. Generally, internet access is not hard to come by but it still raises the possibility of your ability to maintain your data and website being tied to the reliability of your internet service provider.