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Cloud Hosting vs Shared Hosting speed.
First off, if you came here looking to find out which hosting is faster, Cloud Hosting vs Shared Hosting, in the speed department, Cloud Hosting is faster than Shared Hosting, hands down. But, that doesn’t mean that Cloud Hosting would be the best option for your website.
There are situations where you may prefer Shared Hosting to Cloud Hosting, even if Cloud Hosting does provide higher levels of speed and loading times than Shared Hosting.
Shared Hosting, after all, isn’t all bad. In fact, there may be circumstances in which Shared Hosting is probably the best hosting plan for your website at its current stage in development.
However, Cloud Hosting does have several advantages which go beyond speed.
There may come a time where you might want to upgrade your Shared Hosting plan to a Cloud Hosting plan.
You may even want to start your new website on a Cloud Hosting plan to begin with and totally skip the Shared Hosting option.
In this Post, I’m going to look at the advantages and disadvantages as well as some other related questions in regards to Cloud Hosting versus Shared Hosting and what they may mean to you beyond mere speed.
Does hosting affect speed?
Hosting, without a doubt, does affect speed. However, is hosting the most important factor in regards to how fast a website is?
No, not necessarily, but it is certainly a top one.
Other factors that can affect a website’s speed other than hosting, include:
- Website theme.
- Amount of resource intensive media and content is hosted on a particular server.
- The amount of plugins and how heavy those plugins are in as far as the amount of coding each plugin contains.
All these of course add up and can weigh down a site making it more bloated and slower.
Although optimizing those factors are very important, a simple change like moving from Shared Hosting to either Cloud Hosting or a VPS, can give your website almost instantaneously faster speeds.
Why is Cloud Hosting faster?
Cloud Hosting is faster, especially when compared to Shared Hosting because your websites files are literally duplicated and spread out through various servers all across the globe.
Users can then access your website directly from a server closest to them.
This increases load speeds and provides faster access for your users.
Whereas with Shared Hosting, your website’s files are located on just one server that is shared with many other websites.
So if your user happens to be halfway across the world from your shared server, their load time and speeds will be slower, than if they were accessing your website’s files from a closer server located among many in the cloud network of your web hosting provider.
How much traffic can Shared Hosting handle?
For all intents and purposes, by the time you find out how much traffic your Shared Hosting plan can handle, you will probably already be switching to either Cloud Hosting, a VPS or even a Dedicated Server. Why?
Because as your site gains traffic, you may experience a few hiccups along the way with your Shared Hosting plan.
For example, your website may experience brief outages and server up time.
This means your website may actually be down or unavailable to users looking to access it.
This is no good, especially, when it comes to traffic and monetization. You will also notice that your website will load much slower than in the past when it had less traffic.
You’ll also notice your Google Insights page scores declining because of your website’s speed as well.
Now of course, as I’ve mentioned, these may also have to do with the amount of resources your shared server is utilizing for your website.
These can include, as I’ve mentioned, the amount of plugins, how heavily coded they are as well as how well optimized your images and other media files are on your website.
Needless to say, you will often find it’s just much easier to simply migrate and switch from your Shared Hosting plan to a Cloud Hosting plan with either your same hosting provider or switching to an entirely new web hosting provider.
In any event, the reason why you don’t read too much on how much traffic a Shared Hosting plan can handle is probably because it’s never been truly tested.
Is the cloud a server?
The “cloud” is basically a network of servers scattered throughout a country, but more than likely, at least with the best Cloud Hosting’s services, throughout the planet.
So the Cloud is definitely more than just one simple server.
Is Shared Hosting good?
Shared Hosting can be very good for those who are just starting out on limited budgets and are looking to have their WordPress website self-hosted, but are not quite yet ready yet to splash out the little extra money for Cloud Hosting or a VPS.
The quality of Shared Hosting also depends on the hosting provider.
Not all hosting providers that offer Shared Hosting are the same.
But Shared Hosting is probably the cheapest hosting type plan around for self-hosted WordPress websites.
Is Shared Hosting Slow?
Without a doubt, Share Hosting is the cheapest hosting plan option that is available for most self-hosted WordPress websites.
On the flip side, Shared Hosting is probably the slowest type of hosting available as well.
Where is cloud data for your website actually stored?
The data for your website is actually stored on your web hosting provider’s server.
However, as I have mentioned above, those original files are then copied and duplicated.
These duplicated files are then spread out and stored in multiple servers across your web hosting provider’s network around the world.
What is meant by Shared Hosting?
Shared Hosting is when your website is hosted on a server that is shared with other websites.
The amount of websites shared on one server can vary from web hosting provider to web hosting provider.
Does Shared Hosting affect SEO?
In general no. The fact that a website has Shared Hosting alone does not affect a website’s SEO.
However, because Shared Hosting divides its resources among various websites on the same server, this may affect a website’s speed and loading time.
If a site experiences slower than normal website speeds and loads into users browsers slower than other sites, then this can and will affect SEO.
Cloud Hosting vs Shared Hosting speed conclusions.
As you can see, in the Cloud Hosting vs Shared Hosting speed contest, it is no contest.
Cloud Hosting is faster and wins the speed contest hands down.
However, that shouldn’t deter you from looking into Shared Hosting.
If you have a fresh new website, your website’s traffic numbers may not warrant the extra expense of Cloud Hosting. At least not in this stage of its development.
Although as your website’s speed needs increase with hopefully, more and more traffic as visitors discover your website, you may eventually want to upgrade to Cloud Hosting.
Cloud Hosting offers a wide variety of other benefits besides speed as well.
In the end, you may just want to start out your website on Cloud Hosting after all.
Both options do have their place in web hosting though.
So choose which hosting option is best for you, your budget and the stage of your website’s development.
