When we hear talk about cloud hosting generally what people refer to is more along the lines of cloud storage. Things like Amazon Cloudfront, Dropbox, Google Drive, MaxCDN, and a number of others come to mind. You may have heard the term CDN (Content Delivery Network) when referring to the cloud.
You will also see people talking about how it can boost your website’s performance and speed. This is true to some extent, but it depends on the type of cloud setup and configuration they are talking about and more importantly if everything is running optimally.
Most websites that use a cloud based service use it to store images for free or fairly cheap. This can be helpful, but it does not guarantee better performance or 100% up time.
Cloud base storage won’t help if the particular server that your website happens to be on is running slow, or is down (offline). It is only beneficial if your server happens to be running normal and smooth.
If your site/server happens to be running slow your content stored in the cloud will also load much slower. If your site/server happens to be down completely your content stored in the cloud will not load.
Here is what happens…
Assuming your website is hosted on a traditional cheap shared web hosting platform.
Someone enters yoursite.com in their web browser, or they click on your site/page after performing a Google search, etc.
A quick DNS lookup happens and it says go find that site or page in X-Datacenter on X-Server.
The server fires up PHP and MySQL (database). PHP processes and renders the output which loads the content, images, etc. of the particular website. As the page or site loads and some of your images are stored in the cloud your browser will get them from there and in most cases it can speed up the load time.
That is a brief example of how it would happen under normal and ideal circumstances.
If your server/site is loading slow…
Everything contained on your slow loading server will be slow. Once it has loaded enough to know where to get the cloud images they will load fast, but all your content stored on your server will continue loading and processing slow.
If your server/site is down…
In the event that your server/site is down completely a basic simple cloud storage setup won’t do you any good. The images you have stored in the cloud won’t load at all because your site/server needs to tell the end user’s web browser where to get them. If your server/site is down there would be no way of telling a browser/user where to retrieve them from.
In the event that this happens when using this type of cloud it will not help at all.
By Kanoha (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons
(Left) Traditional scheme of distribution (Right) Cloud/CDN scheme of distribution
Ideally you may want to use a full featured cloud hosting service, which would include a web server, PHP, MySQL (database), etc. Basically everything would be stored and processed in the cloud. All your images, template, php files, the database, etc. would all be powered by the cloud. However, these are much more costly and can even be confusing not only to set up, but to pick the right plan or resources your site may need.
What it comes down to is it really depends on the type of cloud service you are talking about and using. Most of the ones people commonly use and refer to are for simple image storage, which is great when everything is running normal. Not so good when things are not.
I am the site owner and administrator of DialMe.com. I write Boonex Dolphin Tutorials on the main part of this website where you will also find tips, webmaster resources and more. Here, on the blog I write about a variety of topics surrounding WordPress, technology, social media/networking, SEO, and webmaster resources.
Boonex Dolphin, Wordpress, Seo, Technology, Web Server and Hosting Specialist.
Cloud Hosting is really Helpful to me when my website server is down.
Anuj recently posted..PHP Code : Creating Thumb From Uploaded Photos
It is good to have cloud storage as backup in case of a slow network or downtime. Thanks for the informative post.
If you’re using a free service you’re taking a risk. I think its much better to move to a paid solution and comparing the costs it’s not a huge investment as well.
Nishadha recently posted..Developers Fiddling with Movie Quotes
You’re absolutely right! And besides, slow loading service can be a bit devastating. Thanks for sharing!
Informative post, but shared hosting is not so cheap as you have told here, hosting providers like hostGator and bluehost are doing best in the market. Sites hosted there also have good opening speed and the process of opening page is not too long to happen.
hamayon recently posted..Why You Should Not Root Your Samsung Galaxy S3
Hi,
I haven’t used cloud storage services so far but I think it’s a good solution to store important stuff from your computer.
Thanks for sharing this information, very interesting post.Cheers.
I have been playing with cloudflare from sometime. But I switched it back to my normal Nameservers. I think I would test it with some new website rather then taking that much risk on an established website.
Keral Patel recently posted..Bandwidth And Its Relationship With Web Server Hosting
I tried Cloudflare a while back too. I ended up turning it off and reverting to my original nameservers too. When it was working normal it was pretty decent, but there were too many times that it would display the site temporarily unavailable message. To me it happened too often, and wasn’t worth it.