An Introduction To Cloud Computing

With cloud computing, and especially cloud web hosting becoming increasingly popular these days we thought we’d provide you with a little introduction to cloud computing and how it can benefit you as an individual or as a business.

Wikipedia define cloud computing as “Cloud computing is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid.”

In basic terms this means that there is an extreme amount of resources available to you and your websites, but, and quite importantly, only if you need them.  So in quiet periods for your sites, as your usage drops, your allocation of the resources will shrink while another website which is entering its peak period can pick up these resources to keep everything running smoothly.

So what are the benefits of this?  Well, lets take an example of this.  You have a website.  It’s a fairly new website for the new small business that you have started.  A few months go by and everything is looking fine.  You’re hosted on a shared server, so you have a defined amount of resources – they don’t change no matter how quiet or how busy your website may be.

Then, your business enters a successful period – your long hours of marketing and providing a quality product have paid off.  Great!  Or is it?  Well it’s great for your business but bad for your website.  And these days, something that is bad for your website can easily and swiftly make your business boom turn into a business bust.  Your growing popularity sees you website traffic increase substantially.  Oh no, the load on your server is now at much greater levels and your website is slowing down quite a bit.  Not a complete disaster, so you think.

But then, a few days later, and a few more days of high traffic and wham bam….. your site is suddenly down.  Obviously, this is not good.  You’ve unfortunately by this stage crashed your server, it’s slowed to a crawl so it’s no longer available or you’ve ran out of resources.  And for any company this is not good and can lead to a massive decrease in sales.

Now you see the problem with non cloud based solutions.  Cloud based web hosting is the way forward for businesses, especially SMEs (small to medium enterprises).  That way, a sudden surge in demand can be coped with fairly well and during your quiet period someone else can take advantage of the extra resources if they need them.

Admittedly, cloud hosting does cost more.  But when a minutes downtime can mean multiple lost sales isn’t it worth the piece of mind to pay as little as £10 extra a month compared to shared hosting?

One of the best (and latest) deals that we have seen around recently is eUKhosts eNlight cloud web hosting.  From as little as £14 a month you can start experiencing the benefits of cloud hosting and the extra piece of mind that comes with it.

But, the best thing about the new eNlight cloud hosting.  It has now brought the ‘pay as you go’ concept, originally associated with mobile phones, to web hosting.  If your site is initially not very busy then you won’t use many resources and therefore, as it is pay as you go, you will get charged less.  If you suddenly boom in business, your site won’t go down.  It will adapt.  As it’s pay as you go you will obviously pay for the extra resources (at a very reasonable rate my I add!) but you can relax safe in the knowledge that whatever happens, your site is not going to crumble under the pressure.

Of course there are other web hosting providers out there providing cloud web hosting solutions but this new service, which was only launched in the past month, has come to our attention due to its amazing feature list and equally amazing price.

Below is a little video which serves as an introduction to cloud computing (and cloud based web hosting) which seeks to complement the information provided in this article.

Are you currently using eNlight?  Are you currently using another cloud web hosting solution?  Let us know your views on any services that you have used or are considering or your views on cloud hosting in general.  We’re looking to compile a list of the best available cloud hosting solutions out there so please do share your thoughts below!