Cloud Hosting for Bloggers. Should you opt for it?
Cloud Hosting for Bloggers. Should you opt for it?

Cloud Hosting for Bloggers – Do you need it?

If I were to ask the tech buzzwords to anyone, Cloud Computing would surely find a place in their answer. Over the years, the industry has largely shifted its base to the cloud. Even if I have to talk about web hosting, the trend is moving towards cloud hosting. With the already crowded space in the shared web hosting providers, the biggies like Google, Azure, and AWS have also joined in with their suite of cloud hosting offerings. However, is cloud hosting for bloggers?

Most of the bloggers start out with a shared hosting plan. Even I started with one. The major reason for that is the ease of setting up a blog. Most of the shared web hosting providers allow for a quick setup of a blog/website. Also, the services they offer for shared hosting are more than enough for a small website or a blog. And lastly, most shared web hosting plans are quite affordable to start with and don’t need a huge investment up front. Another reason why you should host your own content.

What is Cloud Computing ?

I know that most of the people reading this would be rookies or newbies in blogging who are either on a shared hosting service and want to change to cloud hosting for bloggers or simply want to know about cloud hosting. I’ll try to keep things as simple as possible.

To start with, most of the apps or services you use today are hosted on the cloud. Gmail, Outlook are some of the most common examples of Software as a Service. These softwares are running on the cloud and we are using it. SaaS as we call it is one of the most common forms of Cloud-based service.

The next item in the line is Platform as a Service or PaaS. These are services where the company provides you a platform and you use that platform to build your app/service. For example, Google App Engine is a PaaS service provided for software developers to develop and deploy their applications on the cloud. In this case, the service provider ensures that the platform is updated with the latest OS updates, security updates, etc.

SaaS vs PaaS vs IaaS. Courtesy: plesk.com
SaaS vs PaaS vs IaaS. Courtesy: plesk.com

The offering that we are interested in this blog post is called Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS. Cloud Hosting is an IaaS offering where the provider provides you with just a computer on the cloud where you connect from your laptop/desktop and do whatever you want. In this case, it’s your responsibility to manage the OS, Data, security, etc for the instance, you are using. It can be used to host websites and blogs, develop softwares, process files, etc.

I guess, by now you fairly know about Cloud Computing. So let’s dive into Cloud hosting for bloggers.

Cloud Hosting vs Shared Hosting

As mentioned above Cloud Hosting is a form of IaaS offering and it is quite different from the Shared web hosting that most of us use. While shared hosting relies on physical servers with multiple websites hosted on each server, cloud hosting pools all the physical servers and provides a dedicated environment for each user.

To start with, Shared hosting is where a single server is hosting multiple websites. (Think of this as multiple folders in a drive) So all the resources (CPU, RAM, Bandwith) are shared between all the websites. This means that you can have n number of websites hosted on one single server. In case some other website on the server is hogging up resources, your website can perform poorly since all of them are hosted on the same physical server.

Also, I’ve observed that if you are using email service with your shared web hosting plan. If one of the websites is declared as SPAM, then more often than not, mails from your website might also land up in SPAM of the receiver’s inbox. Another reason why your mail server should be separate from the web server. Try GSuite over Cpanel Email.

Cloud Hosting for Bloggers - Do you need it?

When you talk about Cloud Hosting, each website gets its own set of resources which is not shared with anyone else. This means that you have full control over the resources that you pay for and no one else is going to use it. And since your website is not hosted on one physical server, it’s easy for you to scale your website.

If you want higher RAM, higher CPU, it can happen almost instantly. Also if you posted a new blog post that went viral, with cloud hosting for bloggers there are chances that your website will not crash and it can keep on increasing the resources to handle the spike and come back to normal when the traffic reduces.

To understand it in a simple way, imagine a server with 2GB RAM and 2 Processors. In a shared hosting scenario, there can be 100 websites using the same 2GB of RAM and 2 Processors. This means if anyone website is eating more RAM, your site’s performance will be affected. In the case of cloud hosting, this 2GB RAM and 2 Processors are dedicated to you which means much better performance than shared hosting. However, remember that comes with a price.

Final Verdict – Is cloud hosting for bloggers ?

My answer to this is Yes. Cloud hosting is for everyone in fact. Whether you want to host an application or a blog, the choice is yours. With cloud hosting for bloggers your website/blog will get an adrenaline rush and you will see visible performance improvements. Also, the fact that cloud hosting is flexible, it ensures that your website will not return HTTP 50x errors because you’ve exhausted your resources. So cloud hosting for bloggers is a good choice if you are looking for all these features. If your blog receives huge traffic and is slow to respond, cloud hosting is for bloggers like you.

Cloud Hosting for Bloggers. Should you opt for it?
Cloud Hosting for Bloggers. Should you opt for it?

However, for small websites/blogs shared hosting might be a better option to start with. Cloud hosting has a much steeper learning curve and can be daunting for anyone. If you want to leverage the power of cloud hosting but don’t want to learn, then you should be ready to shell out more money.

Cloud hosting as it is costlier than shared hosting and hence newbies should stay away from it until unless you know what you need. Most of the cloud hosting services are unmanaged which means you need to manage everything which can be overwhelming. So if you are starting out, start with shared web hosting. Or if you still want to move to cloud hosting, connect with me. I shall be able to help you out 🙂

Which hosting are you currently using? Are you happy with it? Would you want to switch to cloud hosting for bloggers? Let me know your thoughts on this blog post in the comments below or tweet to me at @Atulmaharaj or DM me on Instagram.

I am taking my blog to the next level with Blogchatter’s #MyFriendAlexa.

About Atulmaharaj

A seasoned blogger and a content marketer for close to a decade now. I write about Food, Technology, Lifestyle, Travel, and Finance related posts. Blogging brings me joy and the best part is I get to read and e-meet so many amazing bloggers! PS: I'm also the founder for Socialmaharaj.com :) Favorite Quote: "Traveling is like reading a book, one who hasn't traveled, hasn't turned a page.

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16 comments

  1. That was an useful blog, not that I understood all but I got some idea About this cloud hosting. Thank you for writing this.

  2. Great post. Very useful to clear some doubts that bloggers might have with regards to hosting. Thanks for sharing.

  3. Good post for new bloggers starting out. When I started out I had no idea about all this. YouTube videos came to my rescue.

    • YouTube is a great resource for anyone who’s planning to start anything, there’s so much for them. Thanks for dropping by.

  4. This is very interesting, Atul. You have explained it so well and so simply that even a tech challenged novice like me could understand it. Going to pester you on how to take the next step.

  5. Bloggers should definitely go for Cloud Hosting!

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