Cloud hosting is becoming increasingly widely used in modern digital infrastructures. However, this fact doesn’t diminish the importance of more traditional dedicated server. If you are going to start an online project in, say, the UK, and need to figure out what type of hosting solution will be the best one for you, be it UK based dedicated server hosting or some cloud solution, then the following reading may clarify the everything you need to know.
What is cloud? What is a dedicated server?
To understand which solution is the most suitable for your particular case, it’s vital to understand, in the first place, the difference between them. Let’s start with the more simple one to understand, dedicated server.
Dedicated server
A dedicated server is in a way the most fundamental hosting solution. Hosting as such is always, in this or that way, powered by servers. Dedicated servers are just these servers that are rented out directly. This is the solution that is a good choice as long as you use all the capacities provided by the server.
The quality of a dedicated server is of course determined by the level of your provider’s quality of service. However, if the provider has a high level of expertise, a dedicated server is supposed to provide the highest levels of reliability and performance. All the resources of a dedicated server are reserved for its owner and it provides you with the freedom to configure it for any project imaginable.
Cloud hosting
Cloud, in contrast to dedicated servers, is technologically more complex. While it’s still based on physical servers, users don’t interact with specific pieces of hardware. Instead, numerous servers are united into a continuous hosting infrastructure by means of virtualization technology. This allows to allocation of precise amounts of resources to particular users, while users can scale their resources in a more flexible way. This way, cloud hosting offers extreme flexibility and speed of deployment, but is, however, not so configurable on the level of hardware.
Dedicated server VS. Cloud
For a more illustrative presentation, let’s compare both hosting options in different aspects:
Resources allocation
When it comes to a dedicated server, here you have a fixed number of resources set by the hardware of your server. The number of resources is rather large so you can host resource-intensive projects. However, if you need to get more resources, you’ll probably either have to migrate to a different server or rent another one. On some occasions, it may be also possible for your provider to upgrade or replace some components of your server with more powerful ones.
Cloud hosting is much more flexible in this regard. Here you can often choose the exact amount for every resource of your server and modify it on the go, with flexible billing, even on an hourly basis.
Configurability
A dedicated server has no limits when it comes to adjusting its configuration to any project. You get just a bare physical machine and you can do anything with it.
Cloud hosting also offers a great level of flexibility. You don’t have that much control over the underlying infrastructure, but you often can have root access and the possibility of choosing the operating system. However, this may vary across different providers.
Performance
On a dedicated server, all of the server resources are at your service, and you can use them as you see fit to reach the optimal performance of your applications.
Cloud hosting generally does offer a high level of performance. However, the complexity of the infrastructure organization may theoretically be more prone to instability on some occasions. On the other hand, on the cloud, there is no single point of failure, and generally, cloud infrastructures are designed as resilient and scalable as possible. Here more aspects depend on the provider.
Location
A dedicated server is a particularly good option when your target audience is located in a certain region and you can choose a dedicated server housed in a data centre in proximity to it, to provide minimal latency and the fastest load speed.
The cloud is not restricted to certain geographic areas as its servers are distributed across multiple data centres. To provide better load speed to particular regions, cloud hosting providers often offer CDN infrastructure that allows the optimization of load speed and load balancing by caching data on edge servers.
Cost
Dedicated servers are usually associated with a considerable price tag, so it makes sense to rent one as long as you benefit from all of its resources.
On cloud hosting, in contrast to a dedicated server, you can flexibly select virtually any amount of resources. You generally pay more money per unit of resource, but here flexibility is the key.
What to choose?
What solution to choose depends on the type of your project. Dedicated servers a good for large-scale projects where you know from the start, how much resources you’re roughly going to need. Cloud hosting is a solution with a focus on flexibility. You can deploy resources quickly, you can scale them up and down at any moment, and you can be billed hourly. In this regard, cloud hosting is great for quickly developing projects that take their shape in course development.
We hope that now you know well the difference between both options and wish you good luck!
