Cloud hosting is quickly becoming the first choice across many different market segments for web applications of all sizes — from startups to enterprises. Instead of purchasing, configuring, installing, and maintaining your own server hardware, you can rent capacity on a cloud hosting service. Developers are beginning to select their cloud hosting services based on maturity of technology, geographical location (to keep latency times to a minimum,) and support for popular software packages.

 Advantages of Cloud Hosting:

Cloud hosting services offer many benefits: some of the more obvious include: lower upfront costs, no hardware to install and maintain, pay-as-you-go (PAYG), access to excess capacity (on some services) that you can use free of charge when your site is not being used, and the rapid elasticity that allows cloud hosting services to scale capacity up or down as demand changes.

Cloud hosting is always the best choice for:

• Business agility 

• Cost savings

• Scalability and elasticity

Disadvantages of Cloud Hosting: 

Although cloud hosting is a newer technology and has its benefits (like most new technologies), there are some disadvantages: 

• Lack of control regarding where data is stored. 

• Applications that require custom servers may not work as well with cloud hosting. 

• limited experience for small businesses.

• Data may be more difficult to recover in case of a disaster, but this has become less of an issue since the disaster recovery services have been improved.

Final Words

Overall, cloud hosting is a definite improvement over traditional hosting and has many benefits that will help small businesses grow.The article explains how cloud hosting provides business agility, cost savings, scalability, enterprise architecture standards to limit reliance on proprietary hardware or software. It then summarizes with support that “cloud is quickly becoming an integral component of not just business strategy, but also business architecture”.