Scalable cloud hosting 101: What you need to know

Organizational demands won’t be uniform throughout the year for most businesses. Wouldn’t it be nice if your resource usage could be quickly scaled with the season so you can save money in the down times?

Consider ecommerce businesses, for instance. In Q3 of 2022 and Q1 of 2023, online sales in America were barely above $250 billion. But in Q4 of 2022, they reached $303 billion. 

The reason for the jump? The explosive holiday shopping season unleashed a storm of online shoppers with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas sales. 

While that pattern might be limited to retailers, seasonal businesses exist in every industry. For example, if you serve landscaping businesses, you might need a system that can meet the peak demand in summer.

While you can design your website or application with the peak demand in mind, bearing high capital requirements and operating expenses to operate seamlessly for a short time isn’t an optimal business solution. 

Instead, you might benefit from a flexible hosting rubber band stretching or contracting according to your needs throughout the year. 

And here’s the good news: Scalable cloud hosting can get you out of the rut by scaling the resources up and down on the fly to protect website performance and your budget. 

Let’s examine what scalable cloud hosting is, how it works, and how to benefit from it.

• What is scalable cloud hosting?
• How does scalable cloud hosting work?
• Types of cloud hosting scaling
• Benefits of scalable cloud hosting
• Use cases for scalable cloud hosting
• How to choose a scalable cloud hosting provider

What is scalable cloud hosting?

Scalable cloud hosting refers to a hosting service that spreads your hosted content across several virtual machines (VMs), which can even be in different data centers across the world.

The main advantage scalable cloud hosting offers is the dynamic provisioning of computing resources. You can increase or decrease computing resources according to your need by adjusting the resources available to each VM or varying the total number of VMs. 

For example, during peak demand, you can increase computing resources, and during offseasons, you can scale down your plan and reduce overhead costs.

Scalable cloud hosting vs. shared hosting

Scalable cloud hosting differs from shared hosting, which stores your content on a single server with multiple other tenants. 

In addition, scalable cloud hosting protects you from having to compete with server neighbors for computing resources or rely on them for data security, as you do in shared hosting. Instead, you get dedicated cloud computing resources and robust cloud-based security. 

Scalable cloud hosting vs. VPS hosting

Since both VPS hosting and scalable cloud hosting rely on VMs, they share similarities. However, a VPS comprises a single VM on a physical server with several other VMs. In contrast, scalable cloud hosting consists of several VMs distributed in data centers worldwide, so it offers increased redundancy and scalability compared to VPS hosting.

How does scalable cloud hosting work?

Scalable cloud hosting uses virtualization to create multiple virtual servers from physical infrastructure. Unlike physical servers, virtual servers don’t require manual RAM replacement whenever you need more memory. Instead, you can automatically scale the virtual machine up or down as required. 

While that’s the TL;DR version, here’s what actually goes on behind the scenes.

• Virtualization: Physical servers are virtualized via a bare metal hypervisor and converted into multiple virtual machines. This lets you pool physical resources, such as CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and SSD storage, and allocate them to different VMs.

• Auto-scaling: Cloud infrastructure has auto-scaling processes that assign more resources from the resource pool to applications experiencing demand spikes, so the peak demand is met without any issues. 

• Redundancy:  Cloud hosted content is generally replicated across multiple locations globally, so the services stay online even if a VM or single data center goes down.

• Load balancing: Load balancers distribute the load across all the servers so individual VMs aren’t overwhelmed during peak demand.

Because these tasks are automated, you don’t need to change the cloud infrastructure manually after you initially configure the cloud hosting service according to your requirements. Instead, you can focus on the business side of things. 

Types of cloud scaling

Scalable cloud hosting is always ready to take on more work due to cloud scalability. But to make the most of this scalability without burning through your funds, you must understand the different types of cloud scalability. 

Horizontal scaling

Horizontal scaling allocates more VMs to a resource-intensive application during peak demand. By distributing the load among multiple VMs, you get high performance, can serve more users, and add more redundancy. 

Horizontal scaling serves well if an application requires many concurrent processes. And it’s also cheaper to horizontally scale the server since you can create more VM instances from the same resource pool without extra costs. 

Vertical scaling

Vertical scaling refers to increasing the computing resources of the VMs or the cloud server. In short, if the resource pool of the cloud server isn’t enough, you scale it up, and that’s vertical scaling. 

You’d typically require vertical scaling if you’re running a resource-intensive application, such as a machine learning platform, that requires high single-threaded performance or has specific hardware requirements. 

However, vertical scaling does mean extra costs because you ask the cloud provider for more resources.

Hybrid scaling

Real-world scenarios often don’t stick with only horizontal or vertical scaling. Instead, they adopt a mix of both by starting with horizontal scaling and opting for vertical scaling if there are bottlenecks. Hybrid scaling ensures you make the most use of available resources before spending more on new resources.

Benefits of scalable cloud hosting

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s discuss the benefits scalable cloud hosting can offer your organization. 

Scalability

Scalability is the primary benefit of scalable cloud hosting. Unlike traditional hosting solutions where fixed resources limit you, you can scale the resources up and down to respond to traffic spikes, user demands, and seasonal variations. 

For example, suppose you manage an online learning platform that helps high school students prep for college entrance exams. You’ll likely experience high activity during the spring and summer and below-average traffic during the winter months.  

With scalable cloud hosting, you can scale the resources, such as RAM and disk space, up during busy seasons and reduce them during slower times to optimize your resource usage while maintaining the platform’s performance.

High availability

Whether you manage an ecommerce website or a SaaS application, downtime is the enemy. After all, Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC) shares that a single hour of downtime can cost more than $300,000 every hour for 91% of enterprises.

Scalable cloud hosting offers protection against downtime costs because it’s built using distributed physical infrastructure, so your hosted content remains available even if a particular data center goes offline. Even multiple outages can be weathered in many cases so that your website stays live and doesn’t suffer performance drops.

Lower costs

Better resource management and lower costs are possible with cost-effective, scalable cloud hosting. Instead of over-allocating computing resources throughout the year to meet temporary peak demand, you can adjust the resources according to changing requirements. 

When you temporarily require more computing resources, you can scale up the cloud server for a limited time and pay for those additional resources as needed. In short, you benefit from pay-as-you-pricing to only pay for the resources you use. 

Security

Security is also a significant benefit of scalable cloud hosting since cloud providers have strict security protocols to protect your hosted content from malicious agents. 

Cloud providers typically segment your traffic into several traffic streams and isolate sensitive data from potential threats. Plus, they often have managed cloud-based firewalls with intrusion detection systems that help you monitor and respond to common security threats and avoid unauthorized access. 

Most cloud providers also implement data encryption, access restriction, and regular security audits to comply with various data security standards. 

Performance

Performance is a major concern for most modern businesses since customers have too many other competitors to pick from. For instance, Digital.com found that more than half of online shoppers will leave ecommerce stores that take over six seconds to fully load.

Cloud hosting easily solves this issue since you don’t share the resources with other neighbors (as in shared hosting) with their own traffic spikes and resource demands, hogging all the power. Plus, you can scale up the resources to meet the peak demand if required. 

And that’s just the start. You also benefit from integrated load balancers that distribute the load across all the VMs to benefit from the available computing resources optimally. 

Last but not least, cloud hosting comes with global servers and robust content delivery networks (CDNs), so you can serve your users with servers closest to them, reducing the latency and load times.

Use cases for scalable cloud hosting

While scalable cloud hosting may not be for everyone, it benefits many applications. Let’s look at some sample use cases to understand when it’s a good idea to fly your company into the cloud. 

Ecommerce websites

If you own an online store, scalable cloud hosting checks off all your needs list. 

The moment you offer a discount that’s too big to be ignored, you’ll get higher traffic than usual. And to benefit from that increased traffic, it’s essential that your website supports the high load and lets shoppers browse for products and complete their purchases without lag or outages. 

Research backs it up, too. For instance, Portent found that a B2C ecommerce website that loads in one second has a 2.5x higher conversion rate than a website that loads in five seconds. 

With scalable cloud hosting, you can quickly adapt to traffic spikes before they cause problems. 

SaaS applications

SaaS applications typically have non-uniform activity patterns based on the habits and needs of your clients. 

When you have consumers in multiple time zones, it often partially evens the load, but it can’t account for monthly or seasonal variations. 

For instance, suppose you have a SaaS app that offers payroll-focused services. Unless your customers plan on running payroll every day, you should expect higher traffic on common paydays in your target industry. 

Media services

While remote workers might be infamous for watching Netflix during working hours (or at least having it on for noise in the background), most media services have heavier consumption outside of work hours, such as traditional prime-time hours. 

You must have enough computing resources to meet the peak demand to ensure everyone watching your media has the same high-quality streamlined experience without the dreaded loading wheel. With scalable cloud hosting, those resources are available without overspending on an over-provisioned non-scalable hosting solution.

How go choose a scalable cloud hosting provider

While cloud hosting offers many benefits, you still need to choose the right cloud hosting platform for you. Here’s what you need to consider:

Customer support

While cloud hosting offers a range of benefits, the complexity of the cloud infrastructure can overwhelm most small IT teams. In fact, IBM found that almost 70% of organizations are not well-equipped to manage cloud-related tasks by themselves.

If you don’t have dedicated cloud practitioners on your team, you need a service that offers 24/7 technical support and assists your in-house IT team with any issues. 

For example, at Liquid Web, you get technical support from the Most Helpful Humans in Hosting® in less than a minute via either phone or chat. 

Budget

Hosting budget often overrules everything else. After all, no budget is unlimited. 

However, even cost-effective cloud hosting’s pay-as-you-go pricing can sometimes result in hefty bills. So, make sure you opt for a provider that offers transparent pricing and all the features you need at affordable prices. 

Security

While cloud hosting plans typically offer better security than most other hosting options, you’re still relying on the hosting provider for that security. See if the cloud provider restricts access control, offers robust firewalls, and takes other security precautions to protect your data.

Besides that, check out reviews of the hosting provider to verify that the hosting provider means business when it comes to security. 

Compliance

Some businesses, like ecommerce businesses and healthcare providers, also need to fulfill compliance requirements like PCI-DSS and HIPAA.

You can typically verify hosting compliances by checking credentials and offerings. For instance, Liquid Web goes a step further than other hosting providers and helps you fulfill the relevant requirements of PCI-DSS with its scanning services. 

Scalability

While scalable cloud hosting offers scalability as part of its core functionality, you still need to ensure the cloud provider doesn’t have a history of overprovisioning resources on busy days and that you can auto-scale resources via the control panel.

Global presence

Hosting content in a global network of data centers so that your content is quickly and reliably served regardless of visitor location is a huge benefit. So, verifying that the cloud provider has data centers near your customers is essential. 

For example, if your primary audience is located in North America and Europe, you’d want multiple data centers on both continents. 

SLA and uptime guarantee

Any hosting company worth its salt doesn’t operate without an SLA and uptime guarantee. 

When comparing cloud hosting providers, go through the SLAs and uptime guarantees with a fine-tooth comb, and don’t sign with a cloud provider that doesn’t back up guarantees. 

At Liquid Web, you can expect to enjoy a network uptime of 100%. We even offer response time guarantees and back it up. If a support agent doesn’t answer your query within 59 seconds, you get 10 times the amount exceeding 59 seconds as a credit for your plan.  

Backup and disaster recovery

Even cloud platform giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure can fail from time to time. Ensure your cloud provider has a backup and disaster recovery system in place to ensure you can continue your operations after downtimes.

For instance, at the very least, a cloud hosting plan should offer daily backups. And as a plus, you should also look for solutions with point-in-time recovery features to recover critical data in case of accidents.  

Getting started with scalable cloud hosting

Scalable cloud hosting lets you offer a streamlined service to your customers at all times. 

That said, you only get all these benefits if the cloud hosting provider handles its part with reliable service round the clock and helps you troubleshoot issues whenever you encounter them. 

If you’re looking for a top-notch, reliable cloud hosting provider, check out Liquid Web. Our dedicated cloud servers come with on-demand scalability with three levels of server management to fit your needs.