Traditional Web hosting Subscriptions are not useful for all types of websites/Web applications. Below are the disadvantages and the solutions to overcome those disadvantages using the cloud.
Advantages of Traditional Web Hosting:
1. Cheaper: “Shared servers” are cheaper. But Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are not cheap in Web hosting.
Disadvantages of Traditional Web Hosting:
1. Wastage of Compute: Most of the time our web site traffic will be low (10% CPU usage), but we are paying for the full CPU size every month.
2. Limited Bandwidth: The internet bandwidth is limited to some GBs or TBs. For Example, if we subscribed to a plan which has 500GB monthly traffic, then our website will be down after consuming the 500GB traffic.
3. Limited Compute: the CPU+RAM/Compute power is limited. If we face a huge traffic, there is a chance of a web site crash.
Advantages of Public Cloud Services:
1. Scalable: We can “Increase or Decrease the Compute, Storage, Network, Database size whenever required”
2. Auto-scaling: Automatically, the number of servers/instances will be increased /decreased as per the traffic to the website. So we will pay only for what we use. For example: if 1000 users are accessing the web site simultaneously, we will be billed $1 per hour, if 10,000 users are accessing, we will be charged $10 per hour.
3. Content delivery network (CDN): Files like Pictures, Java script files, CSS files, videos and many other different file formats can be distributed in the cache servers of cloud. So, users will download the website contents from the nearest cache server. So, the web site/web application performance will be many times faster.
For a full explanation of Auto-scaling and CDN, read Top 10 advantages of the Public Cloud for startups
4. High Security and Reliability: We are going to run the website on our own virtual server in the cloud. We can manage firewall rules ourselves. Backup/recovery of storage volumes/Database can be managed by ourselves and easier.
5. No wastage: if the traffic to our website is less, we can decrease the compute size/or we can use Auto Scaling. So, no wastage of resources.
6. Highly Available: Load balancer can be used to failover between servers/instances which are running in different nearby locations in case of a server crash.
Disadvantages of Public Cloud:
1. Not cheaper. But there is no upfront cost ,so we can go for pay as you go model.