You can find a number of different comparisons between different web hosting plans in the blog articles we provide. Similarly, here in this article, we compare you two completely different web hosting plans, that is, Shared Hosting and Cloud Hosting.
It is not needed to say that web hosting plays an enormous role in making a website or online business successful. There are several web hosting service providers that you can find online with multiple services and different price ranges.
Choosing one among all of the web hosts is a challenge in itself but when the choice on web hosting plans is to be made, users often find themselves in an extremely hard situation.
Again, when it comes to two web hosting plans which are very similar, the difficulty level increases again. Here, I will provide you with a detailed description as well as a comparison between these two web hosting plans making your web hosting dream come true.
What is Shared Hosting?
Shared Hosting, as the name suggests, is the type of web hosting service where a single server hosts multiple websites. As single server resources are shared among various users and each user gets only a section of the server that hosts their website.
Because of all these reasons, the shared hosting package has a very low price as compared to all the other web hosting services. Shared servers can host hundreds of different users where each customer has access to disk space, databases, email accounts, and even different add-ons offered by the host.
Each shared users get the percentage of resources such as RAM, CPU, MySQL server, Apache server, and even mail server.
Shared hosting offers an extremely cost-effective way to provide web hosting services as the costs of maintaining a single server shared among multiple users are low.
This web hosting is best suited to small or even single organizations where you do not need a lot of resources to operate your business. This web hosting plans work for users who do not require advanced configurations, high bandwidth, or even high traffic handling solutions.
If your website has high traffic and requires high bandwidth then, you might want to go for a dedicated or a VPS server to serve your website.
Key features
- Above-average uptime
- Can not handle high-traffic
- Limited resources
- Hosts multiple websites
- Disk space
- Monthly bandwidth
- FTP accessible
- MySQL databases compatible
- Subdomains
- Multiple Email addresses
- Customer Support
Pros
- Cost-effective
- Flexible
- Secured hosting
- Straightforward setup
- Effortless maintenance
Cons
- Possible slowdowns
- Potential risks
- Limited customization
Best web hosts for Shared Hosting
Bluehost
Bluehost hosting plans are one of the popular hosting plans offering its customers with 24/7 customer service. You can get access to their amazing customer support team through live chat, email, phone calls, and even social media.
It is equipped with plans with unmetered bandwidth, fiver email accounts, and not to mention its improved security services. The security services are improved with every upgrade with automatic backups, and a free SSL certificate.
Again when we inspected the Bluehost shared hosting plans, it offered us impressive uptime of 99.99% and fast load times of 405 ms.
DreamHost
Here comes the one of the oldest and the most popular web hosting service providers among the pool of web hosts. DreamHost is nearly 25 years old which was established in 1996, and is host over 1.5 million websites all over the world.
The DreamHost shared hosting service offers above-average uptime of 99.94% and lighting fast page speed of 648 ms. On top of that, the the shared hosting plans comes with the support for the popular applications like WordPress, and website builder which are individually equipped with their own features such as Wix, or Elementor.
SiteGround
Equipped with multiple hosting options, SiteGround is playing the field to provide all the users with what they require. From simple shared hosting, WordPress hosting to more complex Cloud, VPS, and even dedicated hosting plans, you get everything from SiteGround.
However, SiteGround shared hosting plans always are the most popular providing an excellent uptime of 99.99% and load speed of 673 ms. The customer support team is available 24/7 and is equipped with knowledgable, friendly, and fast support. All of the plans come with a free SSL certificate, CDN, and multiple email accounts as well.
What is Cloud Hosting?
Cloud Hosting is a relatively new type of web hosting service that works as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud delivery model. IaaS provides a suite of remote or virtual services and is delivered on an on-demand basis.
These web hosting plans are hosted on top of a cloud computing infrastructure. Cloud Hosting refers to hosting the websites primarily through virtual hardware, storage, network, and complete composite solutions from a cloud vendor.
Using the technique of virtualization, the entire computing data center is delivered and distributed to multiple users simultaneously. The users take advantage of the underlying infrastructure to host their own applications, data, and servers.
Using a cloud platform, you can ensure ultimate flexibility in scaling hosted resources. On top of that, cloud hosting combines the capacity of several servers to provide a single cloud server where the cloud-hosted solutions are cloud servers, cloud storage, cloud desktops, and many more.
Although security and lack of control of data might be a few drawbacks of cloud hosting environment, there are multiple advantages of using cloud hosting are increased availability, reliability, cost-efficiency, and seamless scalability.
Key features
- Reliable hosting plan
- Physical Security
- Scalability
- Flexibility
- Utility style costing
- Responsive load balancing
- Pay for usage instead of server size
- Automatic scaling with downtime
- Over 100 pre-configured applications
- 1-click install
- Automated for DevOps
Pros
- Better uptime
- High availability
- Better performance
- Scalability
- Flexibility
- Rapid deployment
- Backup and disaster recovery
- Lower costs
Cons
- Security issues
- Downtime
- Accessibility
Best web hosts for Cloud Hosting
Cloudways
Cloudways offers a managed cloud-based web hosting plans which are an amazing but relatively new for popular entrepreneurs. It offers cloud services from five different platforms such as Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon Web Service, and Google Cloud.
These are all the heavy hitters in the world of cloud computing. However, the one feature that makes the Cloudways the best is the pay as you go plans. Cloudways does not seek for a lengthy contract like other web hosts and even allows you to use some of its services for free.
A2 Hosting
Established back in 2001, A2 Hosting has delivered fast and amazing uptimes to its users which has impressively increased its user base to 600,000 users. It is the only hosting service on the list that provides green hosting as it has been 100% carbon neutral since 2007.
The customer support offered by A2 Hosting is very efficient with unique and intriguing anytime money-back guarantee. All of the plans are developer-friendly so it is not needed to say that you can customize more than one feature the way it is best suited.
Hostwinds
Relatively new in the field of web hosting, Hostwinds was established back in 2010 and has been offering plans that provides all-in-one experience to customers.
Along with the hosting service, Hostwinds also offer Weebly website builder. Having Weebly by your side to the same amount you get your hosting service has upped the game of Hostwinds as it is extremely beginner-friendly.
The web host is also equipped with a free domain for your website, and unlimited email accounts that you can take advantage of.
Shared Hosting Vs. Cloud Hosting – comparison
Shared Hosting, as well as Cloud Hosting, is both very similar to one another allowing users to be confused. To remove this confusion of yours, here, I present you the differences and similarities between these two web hosting plans.
Differences
| Parameters | Shared Hosting | Cloud Hosting |
| Scale | As shared hosting shared its services to multiple users, the scale of shared hosting is very limited. | Cloud Hosting on the other hand provides a great scale to upgrade or even downgrade your website. |
| Resources & configurations | The server resources is divided into multiple users where each user only get limited amount of those resources. | As in Cloud Hosting, the resources pool work together to provide the resources to multiple users allowing to host larger number of websites. |
| Performance | In Shared Hosting, as the number of servers deployed are few, the performance of shared hosting plans is less as well. | On the other hand, as there are more servers deployed in the Cloud Hosting plans is more, the performance of Cloud Hosting plan is high. |
| Traffic | Because of finite amount of resources, processing power, and storage capacity, Shared Hosting is unable to host multiple visitors. | But, with cloud hosting, as the number of resources and processing power is higher, it can host multiple visitors as well.. |
| Security | The shared hosting environment can lead to several attacks but still can be secured with SSH. | With no doubt, the security of cloud environment is much better with the deployment of multiple layers of recovery option and anti-malware solution. |
| Pricing | The pricing completely depends on the provider, but Shared Hosting is considered the cheapest web hosting plans, even cheaper than the cloud hosting. | Cloud Hosting is quite a bit expensive than the Shared Hosting plans, for obvious reasons explained below. |
Conclusion
Given its advantages, Cloud Hosting is always the best option even for the beginners. But if you have quite a tight budget then Shared Hosting is also a good option for those who are just new. Each of these hosting plans have their own bright as well as dark side. You just need to figure out which is more brighter for your online business so that your website can grow the optimum amount.