Even with the cloud industry thriving in today’s IT world, the choice between cloud-based hosting servers and conventional hosting servers is still a topic of debate and discussion. The main rival of cloud hosting in the hosting world is dedicated server hosting. A neutral comparison is hard to find in the internet, as most discussions end up being one-sided favoring cloud technologies more. 

To get an idea, let’s start from the basics. 

Cloud Technology

The cloud technology has been around for a long while now. But cloud hosting, however, is considered the next big thing not just in the cloud hosting Dubai sector but also across the globe. It could potentially become the single, most preferred source of web hosting and data storage in the not too distant future. 

Cloud server runs on virtualized software. Many data centers house such servers that are running on virtualized environments. So basically, a single server can produce many instances of virtual servers though it appears more akin to dedicated servers to the average user. In reality, a cloud server is running on multiple different servers. So the user won’t be aware of the hardware the server is running on. 

Dedicated Servers

The most beneficial hosting solution in the dedicated hosting Dubai sector, dedicated servers can host highly interactive websites with a large amount of traffic, while making it look easy. Dedicated servers pack powerful hardware and storage options, and essentially costs more than other conventional hosting solutions like shared hosting.

The customer can either buy or lease a dedicated server depending on the needs at hand. The server will be managed by the hosting company and will house only the client’s websites, giving them access to 100% of its resources. Depending on the number and kind of features offered, the price of the hosting package may vary. 

Compared to cloud servers, dedicated servers take some amount of set-up time (takes only a few minutes in cloud servers). 

Cost 

As mentioned above, dedicated servers can be quite expensive but is a complete, robust, and well-managed hosting solution assuming the web hosting provider is reliable. Low-cost dedicated servers are available but doesn’t offer a lot of useful features obviously. 

Cloud hosting, on the other hand, follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model. This means the user need only pay for what they use. There is no cap like dedicated server. If the website requires more resources, it gets access to those resources but the client is billed for that extra amount of resources. 

Performance

Performance-wise, both the cloud and dedicated servers are fast. However, over time a dedicated server might start slowing down because of various factors including unnecessary third party applications, temp files, unwanted program files etc. 

Cloud servers may also experience the same situation over time. However, the user can easily shift to a different instance when one instance becomes ‘dirty’ while simultaneously having the technical team clean up the dirty instance without interruptions. When it comes to dedicated servers, the user will have to ask the technical support team of the hosting company to get the server to run fine again, and the service may experience problems like downtime in the meantime. 

Reliability

Cloud server stores data across many machines in the cloud. Even if one server goes down, the others can pop into action and give user access to the data without hassle. This means, the website will not experience downtimes. However, in some cases, the server may slow down for a short while. 

Dedicated servers do not have that kind of backup, and if the server crashes unexpectedly, the website goes down with it. Until the server comes back online, the website will remain offline. However, such crashes are rare as dedicated servers are generally thoroughly maintained.