Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

March 17, 2011

Load-Balancing – Shared Versus Cloud Hosting

The majority of novice webmasters begin their online endeavors by searching for the cheapest available hosting plan, in order to begin the learning process without making a significant investment. However, the modest percentage of webmasters that actually become successful will inevitably find the need to upgrade to more comprehensive hosting environments such as VPS (virtual private server) and dedicated hosting. Although most people realize that dedicated and VPS hosting is more powerful than shared hosting, the mass majority of them do not realize why. In essence, the sole factor that determines the quality of a web hosting plan and the responsiveness/performance of a web server is the load-balancing technologies and capabilities of that network/server.

What Is Load-Balancing?

With Internet statistics being so inconsistent, it is almost impossible to actually predict web traffic levels and how they will affect server performance. In order to deal with high levels of traffic and heavy spikes in bandwidth/disk space usage, web hosting providers have developed load-balancing technology that evenly distributes web server requests to facilitate and expedite the web hosting process. In essence, load-balancing is the technique or method used by the web hosting provider to maximize web server productivity and maintain optimal performance for as many websites as possible. Load-balancing capabilities differ within each web hosting environment, and the following paragraphs briefly compare the load-balancing capabilities of shared and cloud hosting.

Shared Hosting Load-Balancing

Within the shared hosting environment webmasters are required to share a single web server amongst dozens or even hundreds of webmasters, ultimately adding up to thousands of hosted websites. With so many websites depending upon a single web server, load-balancing becomes a significant task for shared hosting providers. With shared hosting, each webmaster is given a certain set of limitations and restrictions in order to prevent someone from overloading the capabilities of the web server. When these limitations are met there is very little that the web hosting provider can do other than restrict server access, thereby negatively affecting your website performance by causing slow loading web pages and even site downtime. Thus, aside from being known as the most affordable type of hosting, shared hosting is also seen as the most unreliable.

Cloud Hosting Load-Balancing

The cloud hosting environment is one of the most unique and revolutionary hosting types. It shares some similarities with shared and VPS hosting because the load-balancing technology used let's many webmasters utilize a single web server. However, within the cloud hosting environment, rather than randomly sharing all of a web server's resources (as in shared hosting), or evenly compartmentalizing web servers into partitions (as and VPS hosting), the cloud hosting environment gives webmasters access to massive server networks and can be utilized simultaneously for extremely effective load-balancing. Unlike other hosting types, cloud hosting does not charge customers on a predefined monthly basis, but rather calculates a specific amount due at the end of each billing period based on the amount of server resources that have been used.

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