Cloud hosting is basically an effective combination of the more flexible dedicated server and the easier-to-manage shared server. The cloud hosting UAE industry grew rapidly last year rising in demand owing to the various benefits, and the influence of cloud in today’s digital age. 

Dedicated servers are those that can be rented at a data center with just you as the only tenant. Shared servers are servers that accommodate multiple tenants that share server resources. Cloud essentially offers the best of both worlds without each of their shortcomings. 

Cloud hosting

With cloud hosting, resources can be provisioned on demand whenever necessary. Cloud hosting solutions also scale according to the peaks in website traffic. The tenant only needs to pay for the resources the website uses. This auto-scaling capability of cloud hosting also makes it a preferred choice when websites are expecting sudden traffic surge from their occasional marketing campaigns. 

This is also one of the reasons why many companies offering business technology advisory services often recommend the use of the cloud. The nature of cloud hosting services differ depending on various factors including price, virtual machines etc.

Cloud hosts can provide virtual machines which can function like a dedicated server though it’s still only an emulation of a machine. The virtual server is easily configurable, and is just basically lot of data that can be easily replicated, backed up, or migrated elsewhere. It can have its own operating system and can be deployed to a server farm where resources would be abundant, and tenant websites can use as much as they want. Because the OS is not running on a real server hardware, risks are greatly reduced. 

Cloud hosting services come in different types, namely IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, or even FaaS. 

The good & the bad

When it comes to cloud hosting, factors like flexibility, ease of use, safety and security are less relevant as they may vary depending on the service. It can be as complicated and difficult as an unmanaged dedicated server or as simple and easily manageable as a shared server solution. It depends on the website owner’s requirements. 

The pros and cons of cloud hosting can be better analyzed by considering other metrics namely performance, cost, and reliability.

• Performance - The cloud hosting feature where resources are automatically allocated depending on traffic spikes varies with the host and the service plan. Some hosts may have resource limitations on some of their cloud hosting packages though it’s still generally possible to upgrade the hardware to increase performance. 
  
• Reliability - Dedicated and shared servers are susceptible to failure in many ways from an overheated CPU to short circuit and disk corruption. The whole system may go down. Cloud solutions are less dependent on hardware. Even if one server in the cloud network fails, other servers in the network can pick up where things were left off and continue the service without interruption. 
  
• Cost - Cloud hosting comes with a pay-as-you-go pricing model where you only pay for what you use. However, many present day cloud hosting services in Dubai are more complex with mixed pricing models – fixed or variable rate charges. If it’s a monthly payment plan, it could vary from month to month depending on resource usage.
  

In the long run, cloud hosting is expected to eventually replace dedicated and shared server solutions. However, cloud hosting is still in its infancy and is very likely to evolve into a much better form than it is today. Last year, we witnessed the cloud becoming the prime choice of technology for almost every growing application management services company. This also leads us to believe that cloud hosting service will grow exponentially as well like many other cloud computing solutions.