Why I use Cloud Hosting instead of Traditional hosting

[sebflo]

A topic that i discuss often is what hosting company to use and what hosting companies allow adult content.

There are a ton of adult hosting companies out there like host4porn.com and many others and they are great. However I would never go back to traditional hosting companies. Cloud hosting is very accessible with companies like Amazon leading the cloud movement.

There are pros and cons to cloud hosting.

Pro's
- You can scale your website as needed. For example if you have a lot of content but not heavy traffic then you can set up your server with scalable storage and set up your ram and cpu to only have exactly what you need for your traffic.

- You have full sudo access to your Cloud instance. You can update, add, and install any part of your server. Dont want to use apache? add what ever server software you want. Dont want to use php 7.1 go ahead and install what ever version you want. Want true stats? Check your server logs or install monitor software such as iftop or glances.

- You can separate your website. You can have you files, code, and database all separate from each other so if you get your site hacked your data and files are still safe because they are separate. Want to blacklist ip's? You can use fail2ban or similar to setup strict security.

- You get a lot of free services. For example AWS gives you 1 year of free Ec2 which means you get a Linux Server with 1CPU and 1GB of RAM for free for 1 year. They also have free database instances and storage instances.

Con's
- You are the system administrator so you have to set it all up from scratch all you get is a blank slate.

If you are looking to upgrade or get more out of your hosting do yourself a favor and atleast look into cloud hosting with AWS. I am not affiliated with them in any way.

[Brian]

Sorry to ask a dumb question, ignore me if it is too obvious. What is the difference between a cloud and vps hosting option. I'm here to learn and get ahead not piss off people with my dumb newb questions.
Thank you for reading my post.

[sebflo]

Hi thanks for the question that is not a dumb question at all.

When it comes to a VPS there are generally two categories.

Managed and Self Managed VPS.

For the most part companies offer fully managed VPS, when you sign up for this you are given a spot on a server and your spot always has access to a set amount of Ram and a set amount of storage. For example you may sign up to a VPS that has 1GB of RAM and 40GB of storage space. Generally you have your websites code, database, and media files all in the same VPS atleast thats how many people use a VPS. If you need to scale up companies usually have up-sell packages.

Lets say you pay 24.99 for a VPS with 1GB of RAM and 40GB of storage, if you need to grow your storage you usually grow the entire VPS as a package, say 39.99 for a new VPS that has 3GB of RAM and 60GB of storage.

Cloud hosting is similar to a VPS in which you are essentially given a spot in a large cluster of servers, but this time you can configure it any which way you want and are given access to multiple tools. For example you can configure your server to only have 8GB of storage and use a separate storage method that will store files for you such as S3 storage which will allow you to store and unlimited number of files and you will only pay when these files are served. For example lets say you have 100 videos on your site. You can store all 100 videos on S3 storage and lets say 20 people view your videos that day. You only pay for the 20 times the files got requested and served. If you have a day were no videos get requested they you essentially pay nothing.

VPS and Cloud Hosting are similar but with Cloud hosting you get a lot more options, more tools, more control, and best of all you get scalability and redundancy.

Also in a VPS your website is store in a single facility usually, lets say your hosting company is in Los angeles CA, anyone who goes to your website accesses your site from your VPS in LA. In cloud hosting your website is store in multiple cities and countries. Which means not only do you get redundancy of backups but also you get less latency in requests.

There are a lot of other examples and pros, and a lot of other cons too. But this is just a quick overview.

[Kev]

My main beef with cloud is security ... why I always used a managed dedicated server.

[sebflo]

My main beef with cloud is security ... why I always used a managed dedicated server.

Security is the reason people go with cloud. Keeping your application as separate entities is going to keep your data secure add to that cloudflare and fail2ban and you have complete security.

I can see your logic though, with cloud, you are your own security which is great because you learn a lot and are able to do things instantly, but you do have to do otherwise no one does it for you. I can see why you would go with a managed server if you do not want to deal with such things. You are giving up a lot by doing so scalability wise.

[jag]

I've had vps accounts to do some search optimization, but always gone with a dedicated single server. I never understood cloud hosting that well.

[sebflo]

I've had vps accounts to do some search optimization, but always gone with a dedicated single server. I never understood cloud hosting that well.

Can I ask, why do you go with a dedicated server? CPU power? RAM? bandwidth? Storage Space?

[LuKenGas]

I'm not a fan of cloud, I still believe a hardware i use only is the best for me.

[sebflo]

I'm not a fan of cloud, I still believe a hardware i use only is the best for me.

The cloud still runs on hardware its essentially clusters of servers. I still use physical servers but mainly as a project staging server at home and never for production code.

Why are you not a fan?

[razor]

How do you know you have a dedicated server and not a cloud, just because your hosts tells you?

[sebflo]

How do you know you have a dedicated server and not a cloud, just because your hosts tells you?

Thats a great point, your host could be simply up-selling you a cloud instance as just a dedicated server and not giving you all the features that come with a cloud instance such as LAMBDA, RDS, S3, SES, and all the other awesome features that are pretty much standard with cloud providers.

[24alex]

Now you have me curious to look into going with cloud server next.

[viking]

There is cloud hosting and then there is cloud hosting, do your home work.

[JJJ]

There is cloud hosting and then there is cloud hosting, do your home work.

The same is true for all servers. Not all servers even if they have the same specs are as good if the hosting company has them linked to slow switches and poor quality bandwidth.

[trafficseller]

Change is hard for some to accept, the whole hosting business has been moving to cloud computing for years.