Shared vs. Cloud Hosting: What's the Difference?...

Whenever we take a new step like entering a new field in life, we have to make choices. When it comes to blogging, you first have to head up to a hosting company for getting your business or blog online. While there are numerous web hosts, there is a variety of hosting plans offered by them, as well.

Out of a broad spectrum of web hosting types, shared hosting is considered ideal for beginners. While shared hosting is easy on your pocket, most beginners just go with it. And generally, everyone would recommend beginners to do the same.

While there are some having no budget limitation, looking for a better hosting plan that would be more suitable for their online presence. Cloud hosting is an advanced and exclusive type of web hosting, that’s why people are attracted to it.

If you’re willing to see the throughout Shared vs. Cloud Hosting comparison, you’ve landed at the right place. Furthermore, we’ll also be discussing which suits your business the most to thoroughly help you making the right decision between shared vs. cloud hosting.

Shared Hosting

The most basic web hosting kind, “shared hosting” is doubtlessly ideal for beginners. While it’s the cheapest hosting service as well, making your presence online becomes easier and quicker.

As the name shows, in shared hosting, a single dedicated server is being shared among various users. Users get shared resources instead of dedicated ones.

For further simplifying it, the following is an example.

Just suppose that you’ve rented a room with some of your friends. Both may have separate beds and storage. But the basic resources like electricity and water will be shared among you as the common places will be. As a matter of fact, the rent of that room will also be divided.

By the same token, when different websites are being hosted on a single server, server maintenance costs, electricity, and internet costs, etc will be shared among users. As a result, shared hosting will be easy on all individuals’ pockets as compared to renting a dedicated server.

But surely, there are a couple of places where it lost points. For example, whenever a website on that server has a traffic spike, the other users are affected (the more the traffic, the more resources website pulls). As more resources are utilized by that website, others might experience performance issues.

Now, you may wonder if shared hosting is a perfect match for you? Shared hosting can be a solution for entry-level to medium-size businesses. For beginners, it’s a great choice to make, keeping the price and other factors in mind.

Pros of Shared Hosting

Most cost-effective solution
Easy to set-up (No technical knowledge required)
Exceptional to beginners and small business

Cons of Shared Hosting

Shared server resources (resources aren’t dedicated)
Users may feel performance issues whenever another site has a traffic spike
Isn’t as much reliable as cloud hosting and other hosting kinds are

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is the most exclusive web hosting kind which comes at fair pricing as well. But what distinguished shared hosting and cloud hosting? And who wins the throughout comparison of shared vs. cloud hosting. This is what you’re going to find out.

In cloud hosting, your site is being hosted through different servers present in different data centers across the world. All these servers from different regions of the world are interconnected with a network infrastructure. These interconnected servers are collectively termed as a “cluster.

Whenever there’s experienced a problem with any server in the cluster, the others begin performing the tasks assigned to that. Have a look at the following image, I’ve got to simplify the concept of interconnected servers.

That’s how cloud hosting becomes among the most reliable web hosting varieties yet. So, going with cloud hosting will get you a terrific site uptime.

Another main selling point of cloud hosting is scalability. You can choose the hardware resources according to your business needs. Which is probably a great deal of comfort. And takes you away from the requirement of sticking with pre-designed plans.

Generally, companies offer monitoring of resources (through the provided control panel) to let you know what amount of hardware resources your website requires. As a result, you won’t have to overpay for the resources you don’t even need.

Moreover, most cloud providers have a “pay as you use” policy which allows you to rent servers on hourly basics. And they charge only for the hours, you’ve used the server. Now you may think about how many hours would it take to deploy your cloud instance.

Well, Cloud servers are quick to deploy. Companies offer instant server deployment and users get their servers running in seconds.

Pros of Cloud Hosting

Fair and affordable pricing
Resources scalability
Multiple server locations can help improving performance
Impressively reliable
You have to only pay for what you use

Cons of Cloud Hosting

Isn’t easy enough to set up (as shared hosting is)
May require technical knowledge at some places

Shared vs. Cloud Hosting: Difference Between Shared and Cloud Hosting

Shared vs. Cloud Hosting Shared Hosting	Shared vs. Cloud Hosting Cloud Hosting
● Cheap and affordable pricing	● Cheap pricing as compared to renting your own server while expensive as compared to shared hosting
● Easy to set up (no technical knowledge required as cloud hosting requires)	● Requires a bit of technical knowledge and so, isn’t very beginner-friendly
● No scaling options (You have to choose one of the plans)	● Easily scalable (according to your business needs)
● No dedicated hardware resources	● Dedicated hardware resources and better performance (as compared to shared hosting)
● Not too reliable (as compared to cloud hosting)	● Impressively reliable

We hope to know you’ve found out that no one wins the competition of shared vs. cloud hosting. Because both of these carry their own reasons which compel the seekers to go with them. Right?

Shared vs. Cloud Hosting – Which One is Right for You?

After all, the question arises whether which one would be right for you.

Firstly, you have to keep your budget in mind. Let me tell you that the price of starting a shared plan revolves around $2-3 monthly while starter cloud hosting plans cost $5 per month, averagely.

If you can easily afford cloud hosting, head towards the second factor “ease of use”. For beginners, it isn’t a piece of cake to understand all important terms related to It, its management, etc. Though companies offer simplified cloud hosting solutions, there is still the requirement of technical knowledge.

But if you’re having the technical skills to tackle all complexities in cloud hosting, it won’t be wrong to choose cloud hosting for having your online presence.

On the other hand, people on a budget, looking for an inexpensive hosting service, should consider shared hosting.

It’s not only easy on your pocket (especially for beginners that don’t want to invest very much in a new business) but features easy and instant set up and going with one of the best shared hosting providers will get you everything an entry-level site may require.

Hope you loved our way of explaining shared vs. cloud hosting. If you really did. Let us know in the comments.

Which one would you go with? And Why? Let us know.