Cloud hosting is definitely something more and more people are talking about in these days but there is unfortunately a fine line between marketing hype and performance-based fundamentals, which recommend one service or another as effective. As an online business owner, you cannot afford to make uninformed decisions. After all, if your site is offline, you are not able to make money and at the end of the day, that counts more than going with the flow in terms of hosting.
As far as dedicated servers are concerned, the concept is extremely simple: you pay for a server, and it hosts your website. You pay the same amount each month regardless of how many resources you use. Nowadays, you need to pay for what you used is an approach which is as controversial as it is innovative. Cloud hosting is all about usage-based billing. In other words, if you are used more server resources today than yesterday, you will pay more today. An eloquent example is represented by websites, which are subject to the dig effect every once in a while. Let us assume that your website receives 1,000 unique per day, but that it makes it to the dig front page once or twice per month. The result: a huge spike of traffic which takes its toll on the server.
The owner of such a website has a difficult decision to make: normally, a Virtual Private Server or even shared hosting is enough if you are only receiving 1,000 visitors daily. On the other hand, you can get in trouble if your websites receives sudden spikes of traffic.
Should you stick with your current plan and pay less? You could do that but what if your server goes down the minute you start receiving a lot of traffic from Dig? Would you be willing to let tens of thousands of visitor land on a page which does not load and never come back?
How much is that traffic worth to you? Should you upgrade to a dedicated server? Would not you be overpaying if you go dedicated just because you receive more traffic a few days per month?