Cloud hosting pricing works differently from almost every other hosting model, and understanding it is the key to knowing whether cloud hosting actually saves you money or costs you more than a traditional plan. Cloud hosting itself is a relatively new style of hosting that’s starting to pop up everywhere, standing as an alternative to standard hosting environments and well suited towards sites that are looking to scale, or demand flexibility in their hosting setup.
A lot of people decide to use cloud hosting due to its flexible style of pricing alone. But what actually makes the cloud hosting pricing model unique? That’s what we’re going to answer in this post — below we’ll dive into the benefits of cloud hosting and illuminate the pricing differences between traditional hosting and a cloud hosting environment.
Why Use Cloud Hosting?
Cloud hosting is a unique hosting solution that allows for scalable resource use, and flexible pricing, all while getting very high levels of server performance. According to the official NIST definition of cloud computing, on-demand self-service and rapid elasticity are two of its defining characteristics — which is exactly what makes the pricing model behave so differently from traditional hosting.
Users who are just starting their first websites probably won’t get that much value out of cloud hosting — something like a simple and cheap shared hosting package will be enough. But if you’ve been looking to upgrade your hosting to a VPS or dedicated host, then cloud hosting is definitely worth thinking about.
Cloud hosting will give you near unlimited access to server resources that you can scale up or down on demand. Since you aren’t tied to a specific physical server you can scale your resources as your traffic levels rise, with access to a very high-performance server environment that rivals VPS and dedicated servers.
The Traditional Hosting Pricing Model
With traditional hosting, whether that’s shared, VPS, dedicated, or managed, you’re paying for a set amount of server resources on a monthly or yearly basis. A lot of hosting packages will give you unlimited resources to an extent, but you’re mostly paying for that physical server space.
How much you’re paying will depend upon the quality of the host, the total amount of space, memory, CPU, and other resources you need, plus additional things like support and bundled hosting features. One thing’s certain: you’re paying for a fixed amount of server resources, whether you use all of them or not — the opposite of how cloud hosting pricing works.
Think of traditional hosting like a cell phone contract without rollover minutes. You’re paying a set fee every single month whether you end up using all those minutes or not. For some website owners the added cost might not mean much, but if you want the most value out of your dollar, then take a look at cloud hosting’s pricing model.
Breaking Down How Cloud Hosting Pricing Works
In the past, if you wanted a high-performance server environment you’d have to pay a lot for it. This left a lot of website owners in the dust, especially if they only needed access to higher-level server resources every once in a while. Cloud hosting pricing seeks to fill this gap in the market and offer website owners a flexible solution with flexible costs.
With cloud hosting pricing, you only pay for what you use. You’ll have a standard level pricing rate that’s incredibly cheap (think shared hosting pricing), but you’ll have the ability to scale these server resources up and down and only pay for what you use. This is done through strict resource usage monitoring.
Through an intuitive user dashboard, you’ll be able to monitor and allocate additional server resources very quickly, and see your site’s overall usage at a moment’s notice — meaning no surprises when it comes to billing.
Think of cloud hosting pricing as being similar to your electricity bill, depending upon your provider of course. Typically you’re paying based on how much electricity you consumed, and you can even see the detailed breakdown of how much you consumed and its relationship to your total bill.
Is Cloud Hosting Right For You?
By now you should have a better grasp of how cloud hosting pricing works and how it compares to more traditional hosting pricing arrangements. If you need a flexible host that’ll only cost you what you use, cloud hosting is an option worth considering.
If your traffic is steady and predictable, our shared hosting and reseller hosting plans offer that same reliability at a simpler, fixed monthly rate. Contact us if you’d like help figuring out which model fits your site.
