3 Cloud Hosting Myths Debunked

NameHero uses cloud technology for its web hosting, which is a big difference compared to how hosting providers usually implement such services. Instead of a single dedicated server running a fixed number of accounts, cloud hosting pools together the resources of multiple machines, and runs the applications in virtual containers that are easy to move around and adjust. It makes operations like migration, maintenance, and upgrades much easier than they would otherwise have been.

However, there is much misinformation about what constitutes “cloud hosting”. Some of it is unintentional, but sometimes it’s deliberately marketed in a wrong way to give the impression that it’s a wondrous technology that does more than it actually can. Here are some cloud myths debunked, so that you know exactly what you’re getting into.

Myth 1: You Pay Only for What you Use with Cloud Hosting

This myth arises because there are certain products associated with the cloud that charge their users on a “pay for usage” basis. Some examples that come to mind immediately are cloud computing platforms like Amazon and Google, as well as well known cloud service providers like Digital Ocean. The nature of the cloud makes it easy to scale up and down, and so paying based on how much you use instead of a flat fee every month makes a lot of sense.

However, when it specifically comes to “cloud hosting”, this isn’t the case. There is no cloud web hosting service that charges you based on how much you use. That wouldn’t be feasible for any number of reasons.

Myth 2: Cloud Web Hosting Scales your Resources Automatically

The second myth is that your web hosting resources will automatically increase or decrease depending on your server load. This sounds like a fine idea in theory, but it can’t work in practice. One of the reasons is that there’s no limit to how many resources you can throw at a website to make it load faster. More CPU, more I/O limits, and more RAM will always deliver a quicker result than fewer resources. So who is to say how much it should expand or contract to?

I suppose ideally, we should be able to say something like “If my page load speed increases beyond X limits, then allocate more resources” or something like that. But this is such a high-level metric, that it’s impossible for a web hosting provider to not just measure, but also calculate the additional resources to provide. And how would we go about decreasing the resource usage?

Myth 3: Cloud Hosting Means your Site is Served from Everywhere at Once

It’s important to remember that your website still has a single server location even when it’s hosted on the cloud. It’s not as if visitors to your site will connect to a different server depending on the location like a supercharged CDN. While it is possible to leverage cloud computing’s resources to design an architecture that distributes even dynamic content all around the world in real-time, it’s extremely hard and complicated to maintain.

Maybe one day in the future, the technology will be packaged easily enough for large scale implementation, but we’re just not there yet. Cloud web hosting simply means that there is a cluster of machines all pooling their resources together to run your website. Those servers are all sitting together on the same network, and not spread out.

Bottom Line

The cloud is an amazing technology, but it means different things in different industries. In the context of web hosting, it translates into a lower failure rate, and easy scaling without downtime. However, it’s not a magic pill for all your hosting woes!