In recent years, industry buzzwords ‘the cloud’ have dominated the world of IT. The ability to store and access data over the Internet rather than via a single computer’s hard drive has enabled businesses to increase collaboration levels and ultimately boost productivity.

However, the cloud is also making an increasingly big impact on web hosting too. With solutions like cloud VPS from UK2, the resources required to host and maintain a website will be spread across multiple servers working together.

But why is this a must for your business?

Increased uptime

Directly proportional to the performance of your website, server uptime is imperative when it comes to hosting. Unlike traditional hosting, where prolonged periods of downtime are likely if a single server suffers from hardware issues, the cloud provides maximum network uptime and no single point of failure.

If one cloud-based server does encounter a problem or cannot take a user’s request for some reason, another interconnected server will step in and cover the workload instead.

Stronger security

Some businesses are wary of the cloud from a security perspective. However, it actually affords better protection from different threats in a couple of ways.

First of all, cloud hosting infrastructure will secure your website at various levels, including network, data, application and physical. Secondly, hosting providers will protect your site through identify management, data isolation, storage segregation, encrypted solutions, and backup recoveries.

Easily scalable

Should your business enjoy impressive growth and need to increase your online presence accordingly, cloud hosting enables you to scale up resources like bandwidth, storage, and RAM with the greatest of ease. Scaling down your requirements is incredibly simple and straightforward too.

This is in contrast to the limited resources and rigid specifications of traditional hosting. It is rather difficult and usually expensive to ramp up or scale down resources when you need to.

Disaster recovery

While several businesses attempt to protect their site against the threat of hackers and cybercrime, many forget about natural disasters like flooding and storm damage. But with the cloud, data is automatically backed up to an interconnecting server, providing a foolproof solution and comforting peace of mind.

You typically have to arrange for backups yourself with traditional hosting packages, while solutions featuring a single server don’t tend to offer disaster recovery for data and applications.

Environmentally friendly

Although running an eco-friendly enterprise is somewhat of an ideal for many business owners, it can actually afford a number of far-reaching advantages. Seeing as cloud servers are utilized up to full capacity, thereby minimizing idle time and saving energy, this is the most sustainable server solution currently available.

What’s more, cloud hosting eliminates the need to maintain in-house servers, which has the potential to create lots of harmful carbon emissions.

Cost-effectiveness

Last but not least, the cloud-hosting model enables you to pay for what you require with no wasted resources. There are no concerns over capital expenditure either, as you won’t have to invest in any infrastructure.

With alternative hosting solutions, you will usually be forced into paying a fixed price for a specific number of resources and it’s simply too bad if you fail to utilize what you have been allocated.