In the world of hosting there are lots of options, ranging from cents per hour to thousands of dollars per month and including various levels of service from limited support to fully managed. To understand Developer4Lease’s Cloud Hosting, it’s good to take a step back and look over other options available.

Shared Hosting

Typically, shared hosting is the cheapest form of hosting offered. Services are normally no more than $20 per month and can cost as little as a few dollars per month. The reason the prices are low is that each customer is sharing a single server and often there is very limited, if any, support offered. In order to keep prices low, shared hosting providers fit as many customers as they can onto each single server. This is great from a cost perspective, but there are risks created as a result of sharing a single device among many users. One of those risks is the inability for a single shared server to sustain consistent performance. With so many people performing different tasks at different times and drawing different amounts of traffic to their sites all the time, each customer’s account is at the mercy of the other people they’re sharing a server with. If a few people sharing the server suddenly experience a surge of traffic on their websites and the server can’t handle the surge, all the shared users’ website slow down. If the surge is big enough, the server could crash. At that point, all sites are down until the host is able to bring the server back up.

Virtual Private Server Hosting

While a little more expensive than Shared Hosting, VPS Hosting attempts to eliminate some of the risks. With a VPS account, a user still shares a single server with other people. However, controls are put in place that keeps each account from impacting the others. Each customer is assigned a specific amount of computing resources for their sites to run on. If any one customer gets a surge of traffic, none of the other customers are affected since each user is restricted to their allotted amount of resources.

One of the downsides of VPS Hosting is because users are bound to a specific amount of resources, their own traffic surges can cause degraded performance of their site. And, just as in Shared Hosting, if the server as a whole is unable to handle the load of traffic hitting all the sites, it can crash and bring everyone’s websites down with it.

Dedicated Hosting

With Dedicated Hosting, users are not sharing servers with anyone. They are dedicated to each user. This type of hosting can be significantly more expensive than Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting since users are the sole customers paying the cost of the server. Dedicated Hosting is offered with a range of service levels from no support to fully managed. With a dedicated server, one has full control over everything and, depending on the host, is usually able to upgrade components when their growing traffic demands it.

As with Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting, if a site draws a surge of traffic that is large enough, the server can crash and the related sites will go down. As long as the host allows it, proper planning before the traffic surge to upgrade components and/or add additional servers, can help to prevent down time while handling the load of increased traffic.

Cloud Hosting

With a Cloud Hosting account, customers are sharing infrastructure that has been built to scale either automatically as the growing traffic demands or on-demand when the customer decides to increase the performance level of their account. The phrase Cloud Hosting comes from the visual appearance of a Cloud Hosting solution drawn out on paper – many servers connected together in different ways throughout an entire data center.

Cloud Hosting utilizes a very large number of servers connected together for 1) failover – meaning that if one server fails, everything moves over to the next server and keeps running as if nothing happened and 2) scaling – as your website traffic grows, your account automatically (or at your command) grabs additional computing resources allowing you to scale your hosting account up or down as needed.

This type of hosting solution eliminates the problem of server crashes and degraded performance due to increased traffic from your account or any other account sharing the vast infrastructure. It also eliminates the need to plan ahead for traffic surges (via upgrading components/adding more servers) as required by those hosting on a dedicated server.

From a pricing perspective, Cloud Hosting solutions run between Shared Hosting and VPS Hosting. Here, Cloud Hosting for WordPress uses a Cloud Sites account. More information can be found about this type of cloud account by contacting Developer4lease. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you have. For specific pricing, and to find out what is included when you host with Cloud Hosting for WordPress go to ww.image-PSD-to-wordpress.com.