Almost all businesses around the world have a website. These websites function as a digital store for companies, to leap beyond the geographical constraints and grab the attention of online audiences and visitors. However, a lot of clientele received by a website depends on its web host. All the websites available on the internet are hosted at some other place, called the server. This server is adept with certain characteristics like light-fast loading speed, reliable services, and affordable pricing.
Choosing the right web host can have serious effects for a business, especially if a second delay in the page response can cost a company; 7% of its customers. Therefore, page speed is a critical criterion for the rank of any website, wherein the long-term implications of a slow loading website are enough to cast a negative impact on the brand. There are two major types of web hosting servers available, cloud hosting and dedicated servers. However, a web host is selected depending on the relevancy of the business, its budget, and future expansion prospects.

What is dedicated hosting?

A dedicated server hosting environment can just host one client on a physical server. This practically makes the client the owner of the server wherein all the resources, including physical hardware, are available to the clients. Furthermore, these resources are customized according to the needs of the clients, including storage, RAM, bandwidth load, and the type of processor. Such machines are perfect for businesses that need multiple processors, clustering all the servers together, hence known as the private cloud. Dedicated servers consist of many hosting lines, all contributing to a single virtual location however, all of these resources in the virtual space are only available for one client.

Dedicated servers have a lot of benefits over the cloud. These include:

Stable environment: Dedicated server hosting options provide robust options for large computing needs as compared to the cloud. For companies who need to maintain large databases and high-performance computing environments, dedicated servers offer a steadier approach. Furthermore, with one server for one client concept; dedicated hosting offers a predictable and stable environment; with higher security.

Customized services: Dedicated servers hosting environment offers a more customized solution, unlike cloud hosting. Moreover, with dedicated hosting, you are the administrator and the controller of the server, which is not the case with cloud hosting.

Economical: for businesses who are astounded by the ‘pay as you go’ nature of cloud hosting, in the present, they might face issues with a summation of costs in the future, which can go higher than that offered by dedicated hosting.

No shared resources: Unlike cloud hosting, that can let anyone access a portion of the virtual machine, dedicated servers ensure that all the resources are with your business alone.

Transparency: When it comes to debugging issues, performance problems, and reliability issues, transparent responses are always appreciated. Since the cloud is a shared platform, it suffers from issues of obscure hardware and network problems that can directly impact your workload. Changes made in the design and the configuration choices by anyone can result in temporary outages and operational performance issues that had nothing to do with you. With dedicated server hosting, you can check the hardware and rule out the issues faced by the cloud environment.

What is cloud hosting?

With the new paradigm shift of businesses, preferring cloud hosting to build a website on a managed cloud plan with pre-integrated platforms; cloud hosting has become a to-go option for developers. Cloud solutions provide your business with scalability and a higher level of web traffic support as compared to that of a dedicated server. It is, therefore, becoming an essential aspect of keeping websites and mobile apps hosted online.
Cloud hosting has created a wave of transformation not just for the hosting industry but for all those small businesses who are in search of an affordable solution for web hosting plans. Although both cloud and dedicated hosting are very different from each other, cloud hosting has its ultimate benefits over the former.

Affordability: Dedicated hosting services needs businesses to expend a little more than the cloud hosting plans, for both monetary bills and the workforce required to handle the server. Cloud solutions offer flexible approaches like the ‘pay as you go’ and ‘pay for what you use’ services, which are ideal for small to medium-sized companies that contract and expand depending on the market demands. Since businesses do not need to indulge in long-term contracts, the prospect of cloud hosting seems easy and manageable.

Hardware requirements: Cloud hosting allows you to crunch large data and deploy infinite virtual machines without actually needing a lot of hardware components.

Scalability: Cloud solutions are scalable, meaning that they are formulated in such a manner that they can handle the upsurge on the website during peak season and little or no sale during other months. For example, you have a clothing retail brand which is hosting a season end sale. This means that the customers visiting the website will increase during this time. If your website is deployed on a cloud solution, it is also proofed to handle the increased number of visitors, but if not, then your site can go down due to increased visitors. Cloud has the power of automating your bandwidth requirements and auto sales, in a hassle-free manner.

Technology Trends: Cloud framework supports the latest technologies that can be easily implemented as well.

APIs: Cloud servers provide with robust API solution for virtual machines launch, resource monitoring, virtual machine output, generating performance reports without any traditional hardware, network management systems, and data centers.

Cloud or Dedicated: Which one has a better prospect for your business?

The hosting type you go for depends on the business entity and operational needs. For most of the small businesses, the web hosting requirements prefer scalability offered by cloud hosting solutions. As for cloud platforms, they use a single web server stack support that doesn’t entertain custom software requirements of web applications or databases. This is when dedicated servers can prove to be beneficial, as compared to the cloud hosting options.
Dedicated servers offer a better and more personalized experience to business with their base hardware resources, which can be used by developers to custom install along with the programming language extension, tools, utilities, and third-party framework required to run the complex and data-driven web and mobile applications.
If your business is all about the present, then cloud hosting plans can offer amazing services at affordable costs. However, if you want to put the future into consideration as well, then a dedicated server provides better security, performance, and scalability.

Practices that you need to follow for moving the dedicated server to cloud

If your business is switching from dedicated to cloud hosting, the following are some good practices that will help in carrying the process smoothly.

Asses your current environment: This is the first step of migrating your business from dedicated to cloud hosting. This is the planning phase, wherein you need to conduct an in-depth analysis of the current dedicated server hosting environment. This step mainly comprises of identifying what has to be moved, thus ignoring outdated applications and unnecessary and redundant data.
The interdependency study: this step involves the dependency mapping of the workload and their interdependencies. For example, some data and applications are interdependent for proper functioning. You need to know about these relationships before migration to ensure proper functionality.

The destination architecture: This involves taking into consideration the desired level of scalability, flexibility, availability, security, and other features that are required in the destination cloud hosting environment.

First, make the test move: This will help you to address the issues related to performance and compatibility. A test move is a chance for you to solve all the migration issues that might be encountered.

Automation needs: Automation is easily implemented in migration processes, in case there is no update or upgrade required. Also, this helps in cutting the migration costs significantly. There is no such concept of 100% automation, but a majority of it can be evaluated according to the organizational needs; to ensure efficient, technically sound, and cost-effective migration to the cloud server by using the automation tools.

Upgrade and update before migration: It is possible that the current dedicated server is outdated and you might need to update it before migration onto the cloud environment. It is also advised to update your apps before moving to the cloud, to prevent exposing critical information.

Go Dedicated or Cloud depending on your business needs

In case you have a small business and will like to indulge in simple hosting solutions, then dedicated servers are powerful and versatile solutions for you. An administrator can properly manage a dedicated server, thus providing greater performance than the cloud service options.
Many companies are opting for options that allow them to use the benefits of both dedicated and cloud servers. A hybrid cloud uses dedicated and cloud hosting solutions, allowing multiple variations and customizations to attract businesses having specific needs or budgetary constraints.