Traditional web hosts, such as DreamHost and HostGator, offer cloud hosting packages that are priced similarly as their other web hosting packages (typically in the shared or VPS categories). Note that there are different types of cloud hosting.
With traditional hosting, you may need to move to a different hosting type (say, from shared to VPS) in order to obtain the power that your website needs. In addition, cloud hosting makes it incredibly simple for your website to scale resources up or down, as needed. For example, if your website experiences a sudden traffic spike, it can pull resources from another server to prevent slow page loads or, worse, the site going down. With cloud hosting, your website draws resources from multiple servers.Ĭloud hosting's use of multiple servers gives it certain advantages over traditional hosting. However, cloud hosting kicks that single-server hosting model to the curb.
In all these cases, you're basically relying on one server, and that's it. For better service, you can pay for a virtual private server, or even a dedicated server of varying power.
The result is many annoying limitations in terms of power, and the inability to handle sharp traffic surges. For example, shared web hosting has your website literally share resources with other sites that are also hosted exclusively on one server. Traditional hosting sees your website leverage the power of one particular server's CPU, RAM, storage, and data transfers. However, there's another hosting option that distributes your site across multiple servers and provides a flexible way to power your website: cloud hosting. There are many traditional web hosting types for building your website, including shared, dedicated, WordPress hosting, and virtual private servers (VPS).