Differences between Dedicated and Private Cloud Hosting

by Jonathon Linnell

Cloud computing is growing in popularity among companies, but businesses may not be aware of the differences between cloud hosting and dedicated hosting. Understanding the differences can lead to greater profitability.

Dedicated hosting allots private servers to the hiring company. A business is usually able to have their choice of hardware, operating system, and related technical capabilities with dedicated hosting. A company can also select a hosting provider if they do not have an internal technical department. Dedicated hosting typically has a fixed operating cost per month.

The strengths of dedicated hosting include control over the server, more flexibility than shared hosting, and set prices. Dedicated hosting has been a traditional computing choice for businesses of all sizes.

A business draws from a common pool of computing resources when using public cloud hosting. The cloud has the potential to be significantly larger than a dedicated server’s resources depending upon the host. Public cloud hosting usually has pay-as-you-go billing, and businesses can spend a high or low amount depending upon their computing needs.

The advantages of cloud hosting include availability, redundancy, and scalability. Cloud computing services have a shorter track record than dedicated servers, but hybrid and standalone versions of cloud hosting have become popular among certain industries.

Availability, redundancy, and scalability provide significant benefits to businesses. Availability ensures that domestic and international customers have constant access to a company’s applications, retail products, and services. Increased availability allows businesses to market to more potential customers.

Redundancy prevents a company’s offerings from being knocked offline by an unexpected event such as a natural disaster or power outage. Extended hosting downtime or long outages can be fatal for smaller businesses.

Although redundancy can include various protective measures, a simple redundancy protocol is placing computing resources in two different locations. Large companies might maintain two separate properties, but smaller businesses can patronize hosts with multiple data center locations.

Scalability allows a company to grow on demand. For example, a small business might introduce a toy that becomes an overnight success. The small company’s infrastructure might be overwhelmed by customer demand if they cannot scale their computing services up at a fast pace. An overwhelmed infrastructure leads to downtime and lost sales.

Dedicated hosting requires businesses to predict their potential growth. Cloud computing can be purchased on demand, but the computing time can be expensive.

Popular tool suites such as VMware vSphere or Microsoft’s Hyper-V can help small companies migrate some of their data or services into private cloud hosting. Setting up a private cloud will generally involve virtualization of the servers, storage, and networks for companies that are starting from scratch. The exact steps will vary from business to business depending upon their computing needs, customer demands, and the existing technical requirements.

Cloud hosting and dedicated hosting each have their fans. While one company may succeed with cloud hosting, a different business might be more profitable with dedicated hosting. Consider the pros and cons of each style of hosting before making a final decision.

UKFast are a hosting provider of Windows and Linux dedicated server solutions as well as vSphere and Hyper-V virtualisation and cloud hosting specialists.