The Growing Popularity Of Managed Cloud Hosting Services

In the past years, hosting services such as Shared Web hosting, Dedicated Web hosting and hosting a website locally using a company’s own IT infrastructure have been popular among those wishing to host a website for their companies. However recently, the trend of cloud-hosting has rapidly emerged due to numerous advantages it has over other hosting services. The demand for hosting services such as those provided by companies like FireHost and Rackspace has significantly risen. These companies offer cloud-hosting services which provide customized cloud servers to clients along with secured hosting solutions.

Even though small companies and businesses prefer Shared Web hosting due to the cost factor involved, this type of hosting has its drawbacks, the apparent ones being that it does not allow direct access to servers along with offering limited features. Companies can switch to Dedicated Web hosting which is more flexible than Shared Web hosting and offers full server control to clients, but at a steep price which proves to be costly for small businesses. Local hosting is another effective hosting option, but again it requires resources and incurs maintenance costs of web servers which small companies can seldom afford.

Virtual private servers are another option for clients seeking web hosting services, and offers flexibility along with other benefits of dedicated web hosting at lower cost and overheads. However, this does not render them free of problems; with performance issues as well as issues which require a sound know-how of IT and networking, without which the companies would not be able to easily secure their websites.

Now, the cloud-hosting services as mentioned above offer solutions to some of the problems of other hosting services. While the performance is similar to a Dedicated Web hosting service, cloud hosting is less expensive than the former. Apart from that, the ability of cloud servers to handle a large amount of traffic at a time saves your website from traffic spikes or crash, and resource allocation is also made easier than before owing to advanced virtualization hypervisors.

Another big advantage of these managed cloud servers is the reliability and security that they offer to companies, which formerly used to spend thousands of dollars on hiring system administrators for the security and maintenance of web servers.

Some of the established and well-known cloud hosting services include: FireHost, SoftLayer and Rackspace among various others, offering different, advanced features. These include: scalability options to combat unexpected website traffic spikes, support for third-party applications, backup system, advanced security features, 24×7 managed support systems, SSL VPN access, web application protection, and several hardware options offered to clients, as well as a choice of private cloud and public cloud options offered by SoftLayer.

Several issues linked to security have taken place in recent years at various companies such as Sony and Zappos, which have led these companies to consider the option of utilizing managed cloud hosting services. Such security breaches and DDos attacks against PayPal, Visa etc. have increased the security concerns of companies to protect their websites, thus leading to a rise in demand of cloud hosting services.