Oracle Apex shared hosting and cloud hosting are great for your website if you need a powerful hosting solution. However, the major difference between shared and cloud hosting is that cloud hosting integrates the use of multiple servers, while shared hosting uses only one. In this aspect, having access to various servers is considered advantageous. If one server has any problems, your site can simply be switched to another one, decreasing downtime. Cloud hosting ensures a high level of reliability. In this article, we will discuss further in detail the difference between shared and cloud hosting. After reading this article, you will get the answer to ‘What is the difference between shared and cloud hosting.’

What is shared hosting?

What is shared hosting? Shared hosting is the most popularly used and affordable type of hosting solution. In this type, multiple websites share the space of one physical server and its resources. Plus, the overall cost of server maintenance is divided over many customers as the website will share a physical server with one or more other websites.

Benefits of Shared Hosting

There are multiple benefits of shared hosting. Below, we will discuss a few of them. Further we will also discuss shared web hosting vs cloud hosting.

Pricing Structure

One of the major advantages of shared hosting is its low price. Multiple people share the same server, which keeps the cost of the server low.

Shared Hosting Is Accessible

Even if you are a beginner and have never owned a website before, most shared hosting plans have different tools to help you get started. Plus, the server setup is managed for you, so you can focus on designing your new website. Moreover, most shared hosting packages have control panels like cPanel or custom ones. These allow you to change essential server settings through a simple UI.

Shared Hosting Provides Security

Security is undisputable a top priority for any website owner. In this regard, shared hosting doesn’t fall short. Hosting providers invest in powerful security measures to safeguard their shared hosting servers. They usually implement regular security updates, firewalls, and malware scanning to ensure your website remains secure and safe.

What Is Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is similar to VPS hosting. However, the significant difference is that while VPS depends on physical servers, cloud hosting relies on several interconnected servers spread over a broad geographical area. It allows you to divide your data across these broadly distributed virtual servers, which is why it is named cloud and serves your customers more efficiently.

Benefits of Cloud Hosting

Now, let’s move on to the benefits of cloud hosting.

Scalability & Flexibility

A significant advantage of cloud hosting is the scalability it offers. It is particularly beneficial for smaller companies or organizations that experience fast growth, like start-ups. You can effortlessly increase or decrease different resources like storage and bandwidth, as per the news of your organization. On the contrary, you could not do the same with conventional hosting at the same speed and ease.

Traffic & Uptime

With many dedicated and connected servers, you will have less downtime. For instance, if a server fails, another one can take over. However, this is not the case with conventional hosting, which depends on a single server rather than multiple servers. When your server goes down, it can lead to lengthier downtimes. Less downtime for your company’s applications and website can lead to higher productivity for your team.

Downtime & Disaster Recovery

An advantage of cloud hosting is that the multi-server setup allows for automatic backups of your data. Even if any server goes down, there will not be any data loss. Data recovery is a simple procedure for cloud servers. On the other hand, with conventional hosting, all your information is on one server. If that server were to fail, recovery would be much harder.

Shared Hosting vs. Cloud Hosting

Let’s come to the difference between shared hosting and cloud hosting.

Performance

Here cloud hosting vs shared hosting in terms of performance. Shared hosting can easily take a hit in terms of performance. If any website on the server uses the whole available bandwidth, the other websites won’t work, and there’s a probability that your site may crash. It can affect the performance by the number of websites on the server, the whole resources of the server, and how many resources each person uses. On the contrary, in cloud hosting, you always know what resources you have, and if required, you can always scale your server relying on your budget and requirements.

Security

Now, let’s discuss cloud vs shared hosting regarding security. Shared hosting may be lackluster here. This is because if a server gets hacked, all websites are vulnerable to the attack. Therefore, while hosting a website on shared hosting, you must be careful with your security level. Also, you need to keep a strict check on your security measures. In cloud hosting, security is less of an issue. Cloud hosting does have a level of protection that shared hosting cannot afford.

Price

Moving on to shared hosting vs cloud hosting in terms of price, the prices for shared hosting and cloud hosting are different. They depend on the web host, memory, bandwidth, and options offered. However, the average prices can still be known. Shared hosting generally costs around $5 to $15 monthly. However, it can sometimes go up to $50 monthly for some web hosts that provide more resources.

Contrarily, cloud hosting tends to be more costly. Different payment solutions are depending on the hosting provider. Generally, you can pay around $10 to $200 monthly for a sound cloud hosting service. However, for website owners who require fewer resources, there are inexpensive alternatives that cost less. Hoping you have got an answer to ‘What are the main differences between shared and cloud hosting’?.