I’m looking to move my website to a new host, but there is concern that my favorite option only offers dedicated hosting versus cloud. I’m not an engineer, but I would like to understand if dedicated hosting is antiquated technology that nobody should be looking at or if it’s still a viable option for at least the next five years.
In: Technology
There is nothing wrong with dedicated hosting, it’s just more expensive and doesn’t scale as easily with sudden changes in traffic.
The question is if you want to have your data (and that of your customers) in the cloud, i.e. stored in some datacenter somewhere in a specific country and possibly replicated all over the world. If you are a U.S. citizen, you probably don’t care either way, but as a European company this is really bad, as cloud providers are almost exclusively U.S. based and thus storing your data there makes it subject to the Patriot Act legislation. And that is a very big problem with regards to European data protection regulations.
Dedicated hosting would be you having a server yourself on a private server from that company. Cloud hosting would be sharing part of a larger server with other people.
For the end user side of things it will be the exact same, but for you, depending on the host you might have to pay in part for that server on top of the monthly fees for renting it.
Dedicated hosting is hardware dedicated solely to you. They still manage it, but you get much more freedom of control and never have to worry about sharing any resources. You can usually have these servers custom made to order. Expansion requires someone physically plugging in more resources. Moving requires physically moving the machine.
There are two main levels of cloud. You can get cloud virtual machines (platform as a service) where you own virtual computers that are sitting on the same hardware as virtual computers owned by many other customers. You share resources, you have less control.
Or you get software as a service (SAAS). You don’t even own a virtual server with database software on it. You just get a connection you can point your database management software to when developing, and your web server software (on another SAAS) to when serving.
With the last two, expansion is simply filling out a form to request more resources be given. You need more memory or CPU, submit a form, and bam, you have more memory or CPU (and your bill next month will be commensurately bigger). Or you notice your I/O is slow so you request SSD storage instead of spinning disk, and it’s done. You find most of your users are coming from the West Coast and you initially set this up in their Virginia datacenter, so connections aren’t all that fast? No problem, just request it be moved to the Oregon datacenter, and it’s done.
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