Webhosting is a basic requirement for any new undertaking on the web. The right choice of it can have a profound effect on the development of your business.
Two of the common options that are widely spread nowadays are renting either a dedicated server in the UK or a cloud server. The two options have rather different usage cases and understanding the specificity of each is crucial to making the right choice and eventually reaching the prosperity of your web project. This will be the subject of today’s article.
Dedicated server
Let’s start with the dedicated server as a more “classic option”. A dedicated server can be considered the primal hosting solution since it’s presented by a complete server at the disposal of a single user. Such allocation of resources is responsible for a dedicated server fairly considered the most potent, secure, and reliable hosting option. Other hosting solutions have been designed rather to create more cost-efficient options, since one entire server is indeed a lot and costs a lot.
The advantages of a dedicated server include:
- Performance: A dedicated server is by default the most powerful server configuration, providing you with maximum resources that you don’t share with anyone else. For this reason, this solution is optimal for projects that need to handle lots of traffic, high workloads, and host a lot of content with powerful applications. Large e-commerce stores are a common yet not an exhaustive example of this.
- Security: Such solutions as shared hosting don’t guarantee the best security since it can be compromised much easier. Virtual Private Server is good at this, successfully emulating a dedicated virtual environment. However, nothing can superate a dedicated server in terms of security. The fact that only one user has access to the server excludes the risks of the server being hacked by neighboring users. In addition to this, you have full freedom to configure the security of the server at your discretion, enhancing it through special software, security certificates, and firewalls.
- Configurability: The whole server is yours, so you are fully free to configure it at your discretion. Install your operating system and any software, apply any system configuration, and feel free to organize your web space as you see fit.
With all the advantages, a dedicated server is not a universal solution. The reason for this is the lack of flexibility in terms of pricing and resource configurations. You cannot choose fewer resources than can be offered on the cheapest dedicated server, so if you have a smaller project, it will be a waste of money. You also cannot scale it up in case your server resources are not sufficient anymore, so in this case, you’ll have to migrate to more powerful hardware, which is not that fast or convenient.
To solve the drawbacks of a dedicated server, other hosting solutions were introduced, in particular, cloud hosting.
Cloud hosting
Cloud hosting is an alternative hosting solution. It’s one of the solutions that are built based on virtualization technology. Unlike virtual private servers, the resources of the cloud are not fixed within one particular unit, but are delivered to various users on-demand. Cloud gives a good level of performance, security, and configurability, but the main focus of it is flexibility. Let’s have a look at the extra advantages of cloud hosting compared to dedicated servers:
- Scalability: Cloud hosting works on a pay-as-you-go and hourly-paid basis, meaning the highest degree of flexibility among available solutions. You just set an exact amount of memory, storage space, CPU cores, or other parameters.
- Pricing: On cloud hosting, you can select the exact amount of resources you need, paying just as much as necessary, and not wasting a cent.
- Quick deployment: While it can take a couple of hours to provision a dedicated server, in the case of cloud hosting you can start using your capacities instantly, as soon as you have paid.
With this, cloud hosting has a couple of weak spots compared to dedicated hosting:
- Limited control over the underlying hardware: On the cloud, you won’t have as much control over the underlying hardware as on a dedicated server. Even though available capacities are rather flexible, you won’t be able to install your own OS to fine-tune the server environment to your specific projects.
- Higher cost per resource: Since a cloud infrastructure is more complex and harder to maintain, the general cost you would pay for a given amount of resources is higher, which makes the cloud a less reasonable choice in case you are going to need a lot of capacities.
Who is suitable for a dedicated server, and who is suitable for cloud hosting?
As you can conclude from the comparison above, each hosting solution has some specific usage cases. Dedicated hosting is a good solution for a big and demanding website with rather stable resource requirements. Cloud hosting in turn is more suitable for smaller projects that need quicker deployment, a quick access to any amount of resources with the possibility to rescale quickly. Various start-up projects are a common example of those, who can efficiently benefit from cloud hosting.
We hope that upon reading this article, things have become clear for you, and wish you good luck in finding the best hosting solution for your project.
