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You might have heard of 'cloud hosting', but it's a slightly confusing topic for many beginners - which is why we've written this article. We're hoping to demystify what can be a slightly confusing subject, in the hopes of helping you to make the best decision about your own website hosting.

What Cloud Hosting Is, And How It Works

When someone visits a website, what they're actually doing is asking some server somewhere to show it to them - and their browser then renders it when the request has been completed. If too many people ask for this at once, the server gets overloaded and crashes - and nobody can see the website.

Imagine, for a moment, that instead of just one server, you had several - all hooked up to each other. When that request came, all of those machines would be able to lend their power to answering it - no matter how many different websites were stored on any particular one of them. Essentially, it's like having a team of people all working together; if one person falters, tires and needs a break, another can step in to keep the show on the road.

This also means that you don't have to worry about server downtime at all - no one server can be up 100% of the time, but it's vanishingly unlikely that a networked set will all go down at once.

When Might You Want Cloud Hosting?

There are all kinds of reasons that someone might want to consider cloud hosting - both for large, busy websites, and for much smaller websites that have a high chance of upscaling dramatically in the future. Cloud computing is of particular use in this latter case, because it deals with that transition seamlessly and without glitches.

Most of the internet's biggest and busiest websites - including the most popular search engine, the most ubiquitous social network and the most demanding video streaming site - use cloud hosting, because a group of servers can do such a lot that one server alone would struggle under the pressure of. They, of course, tend to have vast banks of dedicated, top of the range servers running in huge humming basements housing only their own machines - but there are smaller-scale methods of using cloud servers, as well.

Smaller, newer businesses can benefit from the easily scalable price plans as well as from the easily scalable processing power. If you think that your website might be soon to take off, it's a good idea to move it to a cloud server sooner rather than later - leave it too long and you could find that all those new visitors are put off by the 404 errors, terrible speed and high percentage of downtime. A cloud server, on the other hand, will handle the escalation very well and won't buckle under the weight of your newfound popularity.