‘Choose, purchase and return from the comfort of your home’ this phrase has taken the world by storm. However, running an ecommerce website requires you to have a stable, steady and flexible platform that can allow you to work towards building the best eCommerce experience an online shopper can get. Keeping the website secure, maintaining a dedicated IP, super performance of each page, ~100% uptime and cloud backup on a daily/ regular basis are some of the aspects that need to be in place for an ecommerce website. Such sites need a hosting service and provider who understands the nitty-gritties of the ecommerce game and offers optimum services.

Cloud and Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting

A good Web Hosting plan is usually the difference between a good-performing and an underperforming website. From the wide array of hosting plans available, Cloud hosting and VPS hosting are plans are preferred by most ecommerce website owners.

Cloud Server Hosting, involves multiple servers working in tandem and connected virtually. An algorithm selects the optimum way of storing, retrieving and rebalancing data to ensure optimum performance of the website. Learn more about Cloud Hosting here.

VPS hosting, is a step above Shared Hosting where one server is divided into multiple computing resources while sharing the hardware resources. It allows you more stability as compared to Shared hosting.

Here is a quick look at a comparison between these two hosting types:

Cloud Hosting VPS Hosting
Performance Cloud resources are ultimately shared so compared to VPS Hosting, performance is lower. Nothing like not having to share resources. Once the VPS is configured as per the plan, your website will get the complete bandwidth to those resources, leading you to have comparatively better performance.
Customization Because Cloud Hosting infrastructure is shared amongst different users and accounts, the average user has less control over their hosting parameters. Owing to the fact that your partition on the VPS server is completely isolated, you have full root access to provide control over customization and configuration to build the environment you want.
Scalability Scalability is the biggest advantage of Cloud Hosting. Owing to the overall architecture of the Cloud, resources can be added and removed instantaneously depending on the need of the site. In VPS Hosting scalability is possible but not as fast as Cloud Hosting. As you are allotted resources based on your plan, you may have to request for additional resources in case of scale ups.
Security As the resources are split across multiple servers, proper account isolation and security measures are needed for Cloud Hosting. VPS Hosting offers some advantages in terms of security over cloud as all of your data is stored on one server as opposed to across a number of individual cloud nodes.
Reliability All resources needed to host your website are split across multiple servers, there is no single point of failure, making it highly reliable. Although VPS Hosting is also very reliable, website downtime can happen if the physical server on which your virtual instance resides fails.
Cost Comparatively cheaper as the cost is divided. Moreover, you can also pay for what you use, and hence be in full control of your Hosting billing. Cloud Hosting Plans cost in the range of $10 to $20 per month. With VPS Hosting, you pay for an allotted amount of resources on a monthly basis. As you are paying for exclusive resources, the price is comparatively higher. VPS Hosting Plans come in the range of $20 to $80 per month.

 

In summary, VPS Hosting is right for websites with predictable traffic and those who want consistent and predictable billing statements. Cloud Hosting will make a lot of sense for websites desiring high resource availability with unpredictable traffic and resource usage. Hope this helps you get a better understanding and if you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to express the same in the comments section below!