In Search of Economical Hosting – Comparison of Cloud and Dedicated Servers

Jul 26,2021 by Manoj Yadav

It always pays to spend some time choosing a particular server hosting model such as dedicated server hosting, virtual private server hosting, or cloud hosting. Although any type of hosting model can get your website or application up and running, you need to find a hosting model that satisfies you requirements.

Dedicated and cloud servers

In dedicated hosting you are provided with a standalone server for hosting your website. Traditionally, this type of hosting has been serving needs of mission critical workloads or tasks that demand a high performance and high security hosting model.

If you are in search of a hosting solution that allows most of the advantages offered by dedicated server hosting at significantly lower prices, then you need to look at VPS hosting model. Virtual private server involves a layer of virtualization that enables multiple virtual server configurations to cater to hosting needs of several websites. As far as the clients are concerned resource availability and server control in VPS hosting remains almost similar to dedicated server hosting.

There is a relatively thin line of differentiation between cloud server and virtual private server since both models are derived by using the process o virtualization. Cloud server hosting providers run compute nodes and storage backend separately for better redundancy and greater scalability.

If you compare dedicated hosting and cloud hosting India on the basis of performance, then you will find that these are fairly at par with each other in terms of pure performance criteria. The major advantage of cloud hosting lies in the reliability of hosting in addition to an excellent performance. By physically separating compute and storage hardware, it is easy to assign new working compute nodes to storage with negligible outages. This feature may not be available with VPS or dedicated server.

Pricing strategies

In order to understand the ways to calculate pricing of dedicated hosting and cloud hosting it is not enough to consider performance numbers alone. Dedicated sever hosting is influenced by a basic minimum commitment per month while cloud hosting follows utility model of payment.

Pricing of hosting models should take into account multiple factors and the importance aspect to be considered is the way the servers are operated. Cloud server hosting can provide an easy way to spin server for instant testing and may not cost more than few cents. Such convenience and economy would not be available in dedicated hosting.

One should also consider that cost of dedicated hosting continues to be applicable to the client even if the server is made to run to its maximum capacity or remains switched off due to any reason. This is due to the fact that entire gamut of resources is kept as reserved for a single client who may or may not be consuming them.

In contrast, cloud hosting clients can save a lot of money on RAM and CPU by shutting down a server for a specified time or can continue to use same storage on a new instance by deleting the earlier server. Cloud hosting allows pay as you use billing method by offering high scalability to match existing level of workloads.

This makes cloud hosting a logical choice for initiating a new project since it is a perfect use case for cloud infrastructure. New projects involve unknown requisites and must be supported by elasticity of running workloads on large scale for short time period. This also covers events of traffic surge.

Concerns with cloud hosting

Real issues with cloud can become evident only when one understands the baseline requirements over a longer time. Every web application needs database for storing information at the backend. All web applications must be supported by high performance disk I/O and sound memory.

Evaluation of absolute cloud involves upfront costs as well as effective hourly costs and can be around $9000 per year for leading cloud service providers. It should be noted that users are not able to capitalize on minute or hour based pricing because databases are designed to exist for a longer period. This explains why we need to extend costs to yearly basis.

Since databases can perform optimally if these are supported by dedicated instances to cater to I/O on a busy host. This will further jack up cloud costs to reach the range of $22000 to $ 27000.

If we are considering cloud costs on annual basis, then it is logical to compare these prices with dedicated server hosting that involves renting resources of a dedicated server.

In contrast similar specifications in dedicated server will cost users $6000 on yearly basis. This makes dedicated servers extremely economical as compared with cloud server hosting.

Alternatively, users can also consider procuring your own hardware and positioning the same at a data center by renting space. This option of colocation service is also an attractive alternative and can prove to be economical resource in the longer run. However it involves considerable upfront costs for purchasing hardware.

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