When there is a problem, good luck on that. You call your technical support and they don’t know anything so they blame someone else. When new versions are out, you might upgrade but that might bring the whole system down.

Now this was for one business application, when you multiply these headaches for dozens of hundreds of business applications, it is easy to figure out why the biggest companies hire the best information technology departments for their needs but small business don’t have a chance.

Cloud computing is a better way to run your business. Instead of running your consumer or business applications yourself, they are run on a shared datacenter. Just plug in like a utility, this makes it fast to get started and costs less. Cloud computing is like Gmail compared to Microsoft Exchange.

• With Gmail, do you need servers and storage? No.
• Do you need a Technical team to keep it up and running? No.
• Do you have to do upgrades? No.

When you use any business application in cloud, you just need to login, customize it and you start using it. That’s the power of cloud computing.

Cloud computing is not just used for consumer applications; It is also being used for business applications. It is also called Enterprise cloud computing. Businesses are running all kind of business applications in cloud computing these days.  E.g. HR, Accounting, CRM and custom build applications. Cloud computing costs less because you don’t need to pay for all the people, products and facilities to run you applications. In addition to that, cloud computing is more scalable, more secure, more reliable and there are vast majority of applications out there. They are based on an architecture called multi-Tenancy. With multi-tenancy application, they don’t need to have a new copy of application for every user. Its just one application every one shares but its flexible enough for every one to customize for their specific needs. It is like a giant office building where every one shares the infrastructure and services and each business can customize their own office base. Cloud computing applications can be scaled to accommodate thousands of users or to down the few ones. Upgrades are taken care of for you so you get security and performance upgrades and new features automatically. They way you keep cloud applications is also different. Forget about buying servers and software. If you are with cloud, you don’t buy anything at all. You only need to pay predictable monthly subscriptions. You only pay for what you use. Cloud applications don’t need your valuable IT resources so your CFO will love it. You can focus on projects that really impact the business like deploying more applications. Cloud computing is a simple idea but can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

Cloud Hosting is an older concept that due to the technology advances is finally started to work very well. Let us say you are a company and you have a website. Your website has a lot of conversations that are exchanged between your members. You start with a few users talking to each other and they start telling their friends about your website, and they tell their friends and their friends tell their friends and so on. Apparently you are successful but with success can come problems. Your equipment cannot keep up with the demands of your growing users. Your service slows down and suddenly your website crashes. You are in trouble.

A few years ago, you would have put your website on web using a computer or server somewhere and when your success kicked in, you have to run around and buy or rent new servers, set them up or have some set them up for you. Hundreds of thousands or companies do so. This process costs a lot of money and it takes lots of time. This is called web hosting it takes time to set them up hosting servers and they cost quite a bit of money to keep running all the time. You pay for these web servers when you are using them and you have to pay for them when you are not using them. Millions of people may want to use your website but if they cannot access your website they become angry. Your successful web based business will shrink away.

But now you have a better option which is called Cloud hosting. With cloud web hosting, you have access to computing power instantly when you need it. Put your website on a cloud server just like you put it on a dedicated server and when people start visiting your website if you suddenly need more computing power, you can scale up as much as you need almost instantly. You get your computing power as you need it from the cloud on demand and your customers stay happy without noticing any difference. If your traffic gets back down you can scale down your servers just as easily to reduce your cost. This is a major advantage of cloud hosting that when you need more computing power, you can get it instantly when you no longer need it, you can drop the extra computing power.

Cloud hosting billing is easy too and it is almost similar to how you pay for your gas or electricity usage. When you turn on the light, your electricity meter starts to count and when you don’t need the light any more then you turn off the light and the meter stops. The more electricity you will use, the more bill you will have to pay, the less you use the less you pay. Similar is the case with cloud hosting billing system, the more resources and bandwidth your use, the more you have to pay. If your website visitors count is low then you have to pay less, when your website grows large you have to pay accordingly.

OK now let’s discuss how you actually work with the cloud web hosting. You cannot physically touch your hardware but you can access your cloud server or hosting easily with your own personal computer. You can put whatever you need on it. Website or software or code or whatever and then just disconnect it when you are finished with it. You never actually touch it physically. The key to cloud hosting is not to touch the hardware. You just focus on your website. Think about your existing hosted websites, do you really care about where your website is located physically? Isn’t it more important that how your website hosting works? And that it is reliable and stable and easy to your?

Here are the 3 reason due to which cloud hosting is getting more popular.

1. Scalability: Its easy to shrink or grow to match your web hosting demands. If you need one, two or ten servers; with clouds hosting, you can easily grow and shrink in accordance with your needs.
2. Instant: Clouds hosting it instant. The computing power is there when you need it. You just need to turn it on. Whatever you need is instantly available on the cloud hosting and when your need goes down, you can simply turn it off.
3. Economical: You can save a lot of money with cloud hosting system. You pay for what you use and not for having the equipment set around just because you might need it some day.

With cloud hosting, you can stop worrying about your hardware. You can work on improving your website instead. Using cloud hosting will save you time and money and its there for you to use instantly. Just dump those old web severs and head to the cloud hosting.

On the other hand, if you website has 1500 or above unique visitors then you should probably look for a VPS hosting provider. VPS means Virtual Private Server, they are usually managed and you don’t need to care about taking backups, installing OS etc. You can easily manage up to 10,000 unique visitors per day on a VPS from a reputable firm. VPS is almost identical to a dedicated server except that it is a virtual server.

For example, if a dedicated server has 2.8 Quad core processor, 4GB RAM, 400GB Diskspace and the server owner setups 4 VPS’s on the server with equal share then each VPS will use 1 core of 2.8 Processor, 1GB RAM and 100GB Diskspace. No VPS user can exceed its resource limit therefore other VPS owners on the same server don’t  get affected by excessive usage of resources by a VPS owner. This ensures that you will get the claimed resources and bandwidth provided that your VPS provider is honest.

If your website has more than 10,000 unique visitors then you will need a dedicated server. A dedicated server is fully dedicated for you. Its just like your home PC, you have full control over it, you can install any thing you want, delete any thing. This way, you are also responsible for every activity conducted on or via your dedicated server. A good dedicated server can easily accommodate 20,000 to 50,000 provided that your website is not a streaming website and the average file size is low. Dedicated servers are usually unmanaged. You have to purchase applications and install them on your server by yourself. You should be a well trained webmaster with very good computer knowledge in order to manage a dedicated server. Managed dedicated servers are also available but they are usually pretty expensive. Another solution can be to hire a system administrator which is also expensive.

If your website has more than 50,000 unique visitors per day then you will need to go for multiple server setups. In this kind of setup, you are only limited by the number of servers you own. The more servers you attach together, the more unique visitors you can handle. I am not going into details of this kind of setup as it is useless for a newbie webmaster. Secondly, if you are owner of a website with more than 50,000 visitors per day then you probably already have enough knowledge to handle your website .