Cloud hosting is one of the three most common types of hosting. It is best described as a group of servers, which share their CPU, RAM, and space to make one big pool of resources, which is then virtually shared among multiple sites and users. Hosting on the cloud is particularly great for its redundancy. Even if one or some of the servers fail for whatever reason, the rest of the machines will keep servicing the websites hosted on the cloud.

Cloud hosting is better than having a dedicated server because of the added level of redundancy. If your dedicated machine suffers a hardware failure for example, your site goes down and there is no fast way to recover service. While on the cloud, if one of the machines that take part of the pool fails, the rest take over and your site won’t experience downtime.

The top 3 most common reasons to use cloud hosting are scalability, reliability, and easy data recovery. Hosting on the cloud allows you more flexible and fast ways of adding more RAM, CPU and space to your account when needed. At SiteGround we offer automatic scaling, triggered by resource deficiency events. When your site is suddenly getting a spike in traffic, our system would automatically add CPU or RAM to keep the service available. Because of the nature of the cloud, where several servers are connected in a system, the service availability and reliability is much better since there is added redundancy – your website won’t go down if one or even a few of the machines fail as the rest will take over the load. And ultimately, even if some of the servers fail and lose data, that data will be available on the rest of the machines and could be recovered easily and quickly.

The biggest difference between cloud hosting and shared hosting is in the number of servers and the way you get resources allocated. On the shared hosting you get a single server and all sites hosted on it share its resources, but since there is no limit on their usage, any of those sites may take all the machine’s CPU and RAM for its own benefit and at the disadvantage of the rest. On the cloud you get hosted on a pool of servers, which improves the redundancy of the service, and their shared resources get virtually partitioned so that your site gets a dedicated amount, which no one else can abuse.