What is Cloud Hosting?

Think of how often you’ve been asked these two questions in quick succession at a party.

1. “What’s your name?”

2. “What do you do?”

These two questions give us a quick snapshot of a person and a brief story of who they are, what they are doing and where they are going next.

“Peter – I’m a Product Owner at Bytemark, a Cloud Hosting company”

This creates more questions than it answers.

In this brief blog post, I’ll answer the most frequently asked 3rd question… ‘What even is Cloud Hosting?’.

What is Hosting?

Web hosting is a leased service that makes websites (or other data) accessible by others via the internet.

Web hosts (such as Bytemark) lease you computing space (often known as a ‘Server’) and a fast connection to the internet, typically within a data centre.

When someone goes on your website, the visitor connects to your server, which then provides the website to the visitor.

For example, you might use hosting to make an eCommerce website, blog or portfolio available on the internet.

What is the Cloud?

The ‘Cloud’ is a large amount of computing space, stored across multiple servers, accessible via the internet. 

A useful metaphor is renting a van. Rather than everyone owning an expensive van for infrequent use, there is a pool of vans available for everyone to rent whenever they need one. This is cheaper than buying your own van, gives you a range of vehicles to match your needs and you don’t need to maintain one. Swap ‘van‘ for ‘server‘ and this is the ‘Cloud’.

Cloud + Hosting = What is Cloud Hosting?

Historically, hosting was a server assigned to you within the host’s data centre. This limits you to the specification of that particular server – if you need more power or storage, you’ll need a new computer or an upgrade, just like your computer at home.

Cloud Hosting is hosting your website (or other data) on your hosting provider’s cloud. You can flexibly and affordably create your own server and change its configuration as-and-when you require, pulling its overall computing resources from your hosting provider’s cloud.

Want Cloud Hosting?

If you haven’t tried Bytemark Cloud before, or haven’t checked it out in a few months, try our 7-day free trial and start creating your own Cloud Servers today.

---