Cloud vs Dedicated Hosting

cloud-vs-dedicated-hosting

Previously our Ops Manager has written on his view of Dedicated Servers vs Cloud Computing . Now, our Technical Lead adds his opinion on this key industry debate.

Cloud vs Dedicated Hosting – Fundamentals

The major differences between cloud and dedicated hosting are that on the dedicated side you can put your finger on and say: “This is my server” while on a cloud one you can’t. Dedicated hosting more likely refers to some form of hardware that is provided to serve the client while a cloud hosting environment is one more likely to be a service, even if it is called a server.

Cloud vs Dedicated Hosting – Performance vs Cost

As the name suggests, dedicated hosting costs more due to the fact it is dedicated to you while on the cloud hosting side you can have a piece of it at reduced costs. There are many pros and cons to have either of them but basically if you need easy access and easy management and the peak performance is further down in the priority list you’ll be probably go for cloud hosting. If nothing else is as important as performance or throughput of your database server then you’ll pick dedicated because you just don’t want to share resources.

Cloud vs Dedicated Hosting – Resilience

There are also some additional aspects (other than cost) that have not been actively discussed in hosting forums and which should be taken into consideration. If any company provides any form of public cloud service there is always more resilience built into the service than into a dedicated one. The simple reason behind this is that the slightest outage will result in a larger impact and having a big outage is a shot in the company’s own foot. With a dedicated hosting environment you can achieve the same level of resilience, but the resulting costs will be much higher due to the fact that as the entire solution is just yours only you are paying for it. If there is an issue with the dedicated hosting service most of the time the provider cannot get the service back without the help of third party support, such as the hardware manufacturer, which results in longer downtime. On a cloud hosting solution, which has been built and designed by the provider, a better response time and reduced outage window of service can be guaranteed.

Cloud vs Dedicated Hosting – Digital vs Analogue

As an end note you could put it like this: Cloud vs Dedicated Hosting is a bit like digital vs analogue technology. The ultimate is analogue but it is very complex and expensive while digital is cheap with many unique features available to the mass public. Therefore it’s likely that in the long run cloud hosting will outgun dedicated in small business and home/public sector simply because it is cheaper.