Even if cloud hosting has its benefits, when it comes to small businesses, the dedicated hosting seems to be a far more appropriate choice. To understand why dedicated hosting may work better for a company, let’s take it meticulously and see the most critical aspects.
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Type of performance
Dedicated servers ensure the highest performance. In the case of cloud solutions, the customers share the underlying storage and network, which can make the disk I/O unpredictable. When a client is transmitting important amounts of write requests to the storage array, the risk for a slowdown is quite high. As the upstream network is shared, your site is going to suffer as well.
Many of the issues for the clients using cloud hosting or VPS are originated on the disk IO. This sort of problems is difficult to solve within the cloud framework.
Besides, it’s typical for the cloud host to provide more storage, but not faster storage. Even if you’re can scale up CPU and Ram with many cloud hosts, it’s not going to be possible for scaling disk IO.
- Transparency
Transparency is fundamental for solving performance problems or reliability matters. In the case of many cloud hosting services, you’re not going to be able to take a look to see who’s powering the operations per se.
It’s pretty standard for cloud services to cover the hardware and network issues. The underlying hardware problems cause most of the outages.
When you’re using cloud hosting, you’re sharing the resources with other clients (Ram, CPU, and network including). Cloud software is going to try to solve it with the other clients, but it may not work. The configuration settings or the design can make a single user crush the local compute node. It’s going to lead to brief outages and performance problems for your site. Don’t expect the providers to acknowledge it or solve it- it’s not going to happen really soon.
You should also be aware of the hardware problems. Once it’s discovered, the instance may be moved to another physical node to solve it. Even if the migrations sounds easy in cloud hosting, the movement may not be required for the dedicated server. The hardware may be checked so that the problem can reveal.
- Redundancy
Even if many think that the cloud is redundant, it’s not the case at times. A node in the cloud isn’t more dependable than a single dedicated server.
In the case of cloud computing, when the node dies, the workload is going to die as well. It resembles the CPU, RAM or power supply failing on a dedicated server.
You have to create redundancy into the system, even if it’s the cloud hosting that you’re going with. Just because you’re moving to cloud your hosting is going to be more reliable; you need to do it dependable, no matter which hosting you choose.
The complexity and the poor transparency of cloud hosting leads to poor reliability of cloud hosting. Make a clearer idea about web hosting and various types by scrolling the reviews at thehostinginstitute.com. You can find a lot of useful info about web hosting and decide for yourself which kind works the best for you and your business.
- Complexity
You may think that complexity is functional, but that’s not entirely true. Cloud infrastructure is only going to add more layers that one may not need. Your IP addresses may not connect to a particular EC2 instance automatically. When you stop and start the instance, you also need to re-connect the IP address. The EBS storage may come to an end due to error. Even if you get plenty of tools, you need to know how to use them.
You’re not going to experience this sort of problem with the dedicated hosting. Why use a complex infrastructure that makes no use to you, anyway? Simple is better so you should use the dedicated hosting for simple needs.
Don’t forget that you have to pay the extra buck for the complexity- the hardware and the expert help don’t come cheap.
- Scalability
Scalability is one of the main assets of cloud hosting. Even if you may be able to scale some of your computing resources, that may not be the case for your operations or applications. The scalability is somewhat limited when you’re using a hosting control panel. You can increase the CPU/RAM, but you have the choices when using dedicated hosting as well. Cloud hosting makes it more accessible.
When using cloud hosting, the scaling of disk IO is limited or not available, which is a common problem. You have to create applications and take care of them without ever forgetting about scalability. Crowing applications into a modern, scalable cloud framework is going to fail, sooner or later.
- Lock-in
Migration is always going to cost you. When you use more complex services from your cloud host, you’re going to risk getting locked into their solutions. If they change the prices, services or support a lot, it’s going to increase your bill in no time. And even if nothing changes with your cloud host, your business may go through some changes after some time. It’s mandatory that you look into your migration options before you settle on a cloud host.
The cloud services are pretty similar out there, and database abstraction layers, object-based storage, and various technologies may present different APIs. For instance, you may have to re-build your entire app to make it work with other object-based storage models. Therefore, migrating is going to become both pricey and tricky.
That’s not the case for the dedicated hosting. When you’re using a hosting control, migration to a different service provider is the both easy and user-friendly process.
- Price
Cloud hosting is more expensive than dedicated hosting, especially if your business is small. The more you look into it, the faster you’re going to understand that dedicated hosting is cheaper than cloud hosting.
The disk performance is the most important cause for that. It’s tricky to run the cost comparison between the dedicated and the cloud hosting. You may want to use the cloud infrastructure for addressing various performance problems. Even if it’s clear for you what you need, the costs are rarely fixed with the cloud hosting services. Which can only mean one thing: it’s going to get more expensive in the long run.
What’s the final take?
If your business is small and your hosting operations are rather simple, you should take a look at the dedicated hosting services. Even if cloud hosting is all the rage for quite some time now, it’s dedicated web hosting (with proper management) that ensures better performance and reliability for a business.
