Cloud Hosting VS Shared Hosting

Hello guys,
am new to Hosting.
I was hearing about cloud hosting every where, many sites are now providing cloud hosting and cliam to provide 100% Uptime
Is 100% uptime possible? If Yes then How?
What is the difference between Cloud Hosting and Shared hosting?

No such thing as 100% Up Time in my experience maybe 99.9% but not 100%. If a company does say it provides 100% up time ask them for an SLA (Service Level Agreement) so that you know what to expect if uptime is met monthly.

Cloud hosting is the next generation of shared hosting where instead of running apps, clients and websites on 1 physical machine. Data centers and providers are now hosting multiple clients, apps and websites on on any part/ multiple physical servers that are apart of a "farm" of machines that are connected through high speed networking solutions. By doing this they are able to use virtualization technology to distribute all of the necessary operations across the many available nodes. Or what many like to call the "The Cloud" the cloud typically/usually means that when one machine goes down the whole system does not go down meaning that cloud hosting in theory can provide 100% Up Time.
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Great explanation of cloud hosting man!

Derrick H said:

No such thing as 100% Up Time in my experience maybe 99.9% but not 100%. If a company does say it provides 100% up time ask them for an SLA (Service Level Agreement) so that you know what to expect if uptime is met monthly.

Cloud hosting is the next generation of shared hosting where instead of running apps, clients and websites on 1 physical machine. Data centers and providers are now hosting multiple clients, apps and websites on on any part/ multiple physical servers that are apart of a "farm" of machines that are connected through high speed networking solutions. By doing this they are able to use virtualization technology to distribute all of the necessary operations across the many available nodes. Or what many like to call the "The Cloud" the cloud typically/usually means that when one machine goes down the whole system does not go down meaning that cloud hosting in theory can provide 100% Up Time.

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There is hardly any comparison between shared and cloud except you can host websites and has resources.

Shared:
- Hosted using 1 server
- Limited resources (hd, ram, cpu, bandwith)
- If the server goes down, your site goes down
- If you need to upgrade to something much more powerful you need to switch to a vps/dedi which will take time
- Not suitable for high intensity websites

Cloud:
- Hosted on many servers
- Because of the above, it can have unlimited amounts of resources. I'm not saying they can achieve it, but the resources are pooled from many servers
- If a server goes down, it is redundant and you will stay up (near 100% uptime, but as above ask for an SLA if they say X% uptime)
- If you need more resources, you just ask. No need to change anything. Some have time alotments where it will autoscale to X amount of resources at a certain time, then scale to Y and another time saving you money. They also have usage autoscale so if your site needs more than it has, it can automatically accomodate (at a premium)
- Practically born for high usage sites

Is cloud hosting better than vps? I need a host that will be fast and reliable for a very large site, with thousands of posts (wordpress), and pictures. Anyone can help?

Zapdos is right and has the best description of how the cloud hosting works. I myself had a shared account that had some problems and my sites were down for 4 days ....... nothing I could do. Cloud could help you in an event like this. My vote is cloud.

Adding to Zapdos' description, Cloud hosting is also a new buzz word dedicated to squeeze your moneys worth out of your tight budget. Let me explain. On most shared hosts, servers are build in such a way that they have some kind of redundancy, like RAID1, multiple NICs etc. There are two unwanted scenarios that usually happen, one is that machine goes down, in which case at least your data can be saved while residing on RAID1 and second that network connectivity goes to oblivion: both are usually solved in a short time, unless you picked up some provider that doesn't care about its customers, doesn't know stuff or is just plain old stingy.

Cloud architecture is strongly advertised as new silver bullet, which gives you an opportunity to get 100% SLA and elastic computing resources. That would be so great, if it wasn't for those scenarios again which can also happen in cloud. And they do happen: http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/cloud-failures-cost-more-71-million-2007-195895 (a bit shit*y article, but you will get the point).
Please also note the following quote from there: "The average unavailability of cloud services is 7.5 hours per year, amounting to an availability rate of 99.9 percent, according to the group's preliminary results. It is extremely far from the expected reliability of mission critical system (99.999 percent)"

So, where do you stand here? I would go with good shared hosting anytime, and if I surpass its limit would decide rather for dedicated servers (wiredtree - managed, ovh - unmanaged) then go ever into cloud.

maxxwilliams said:

Is cloud hosting better than vps? I need a host that will be fast and reliable for a very large site, with thousands of posts (wordpress), and pictures. Anyone can help?

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Yes and no.
Every VPS provider is different. Every cloud provider is different. You need to find out which company will better suit your needs. A VPS will certainly be cheaper than cloud hosting with better specs. For any site that has lots of traffic my advice is to fix resource blackholes and then scale. Find slow queries, slow loops and fix them. You should also be moving your storage off of the VPS and onto a CDN as it will decrease your monthly cost and increase performance. Doing this with your website design images, javascript and css is also advised.
Once you outgrow that plan, upgrade to a dedicated. Outgrow that, look into switching software. Apache is notoriously slow if you're not good with optimizing it. Look at things like nginx, lighttpd, litespeed, cheroke for http servers. Find out if a flat database would be good. If searches are killing your site try switching over to lucene. Move your database to another server. Still growing? Now you're at the top and need to start clustering and optimizing even more.


TL;DR
An optimized site can be on a shared server while an unoptimized site will require a dedicated. Optimize -> Upgrade -> Optimize -> Upgrade

If you are hosting your website with in an shared hosting service, this means all applications and data resources being used by your account, is also being shared with many other users on one server. Your website will share the same server resources as all other websites on the server such as CPU, Memory, disk space, bandwidth etc. The servers running shared hosting accounts are almost always fully loaded.

On the cloud, however, you will not have to worry about these issues. The cloud hosting environment is a dedicated hosting service that allows you to manage and maintain your website with in a server that is only dedicated to you. So this means that all resources allocated at the time of creation of your server that become available, are for you to use and you alone.

Both cloud and shared hosting both have pro and cons about them. You really have to look at what your needs are and figure out what is best for you. For me I like having my own dedicated server where I am the only one on it. I keep my own backups so if something happens to the server I can be back up and running in no time.

When you get into cloud the more space and resources that you need the more its going to cost you. Sometimes it's just cheaper to go Dedicated.

If a network provider had issues with bandwidth or power it would not matter if you are on a shared server or a cloud. They would be down just the same. really only protection the cloud gives you is if one server goes out your site is not taken off line. But then again if you are with a good host that is using newer servers the odds of a server going down because of that are very low.

You also have other things to worry about on cloud. Example AWS where the tech put in the wrong code and took down half the cloud network for hours. Once again when you are on your own server this would be limited as well.

Like I said there are pro's and cons both ways.

CenTex Hosting said:

Both cloud and shared hosting both have pro and cons about them. You really have to look at what your needs are and figure out what is best for you. For me I like having my own dedicated server where I am the only one on it. I keep my own backups so if something happens to the server I can be back up and running in no time.

When you get into cloud the more space and resources that you need the more its going to cost you. Sometimes it's just cheaper to go Dedicated.

If a network provider had issues with bandwidth or power it would not matter if you are on a shared server or a cloud. They would be down just the same. really only protection the cloud gives you is if one server goes out your site is not taken off line. But then again if you are with a good host that is using newer servers the odds of a server going down because of that are very low.

You also have other things to worry about on cloud. Example AWS where the tech put in the wrong code and took down half the cloud network for hours. Once again when you are on your own server this would be limited as well.

Like I said there are pro's and cons both ways.

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What made you guys bump a 5 year old thread?

Practically it is not possible to provide uptime 100% may be it is 99.9%. When we talk about which hosting is best then it is depend upon your requirement what you want. But when you technically check cloud comprises of a very large cluster of servers all working together, each contributing processing power, memory (RAM), Disk I/O and storage space to the Cloud Resource Pool (CRP) so i suggest you go for cloud hosting it is best know as compare to shared hosting