What is the difference between small business server hosting and cloud server hosting?

Author: Anju Choudhary

A web host or webhosting is a business that offers technical services to a website or webpage to be active on the internet. In general, web host providers’ use physical machine or special computer to store the website files which literally called a server.

Although anyone can have a website online for business people, nowadays it becomes essential. For hosting a business website a special type of server required since such type of websites requires special and high resources from the server to provide is full services to its users.

Web Hosting for Business Website

Many host providers just like India’s leading web hosting solution company eWebGuru offers special business server hosting. For a small business, acquiring such small business server hosting for their business site is beneficial and future proof. Apart from small business server hosting, webmasters do prefer cloud server hosting for business websites since it posses’ peculiar advantages like future proof and many more.

Picking small business server hosting or cloud server hosting is truly depends upon the site and site owners/webmasters need. India’s reliable and trustworthy web hosting provider eWebGuru offers all such services for an affordable price.

Before getting into the difference between small businesses server hosting and cloud server hosting, let brush up with some basis.

Small business Server

As per the technical aspect, a small business server is a typical low configured machine, which is specially designed to afford for the small business website. The server comes with pre-installed software that can power the small businesses online.

When compared with other dedicated servers, which are used for large, corporate the small business server operations are limited and it specifically designed to perform the designated task. However, owning a small business server can be beneficial for the startup businesses that are looking to grow stronger with high visitor’s traffic.

Benefits of Small Business Hosting

  • Scale Resources Instantly- When you start to improve your business, it can also be improved to handle it smoothly. RAM and CPU on an effective server are only used by your small business so you can improve this feature as needed and you are far more limited in terms of how much traffic you can handle.
  • Enhanced Security- You can install the best security features on your site, your site's security can be compromised when you share your hosting. With the hosting server, you do not need to worry about your site's security because you don't share space with spammers, malicious websites, and hackers.
  • Save Money And Time- It is very important to save a lot of money and time for small business owners. By paying experts to manage your server, you will be able to save your time. You can be sure that everything will be fine and you don't need to lose money because of server problems.
  • Full Control - You have full control of the server because it's yours. You can add files, sites of your choice, and other features that you want without limitation. Because of the control, you can adjust the server according to your needs. You can adjust the CPU, RAM, software, disk space, and anything else you want to create the server environment you want.
  • Extraordinary Technical Support- If you provide products or services through your website, then you have timely and useful customer support requirements. If you don't have your technical skills, your hosting provider will become like a member of a technical team that you never had.
  • Host Multiple Domains- Just because you have a small business, does not mean you have to have only one domain. Many companies have multiple domains for various products or branches of their business. This is another area where choosing hosting services is beneficial because it has the resources to support more domains without sacrificing performance or reliability.

Cloud Business Server

Cloud business server performs all the logical operation that a normal server does via cloud computing platform. Although the functionality and capabilities of a cloud business server are pretty much the same when compared with other servers, it can be accessed remotely by the host service provider.

In simple words, a cloud server can also be referred as a virtual private server that works as Infrastructure as a Server (IaaS) service model. In a cloud server, there are two types logical and physical cloud server and those two types elaborated below.

  • Logical Cloud Server: Logical cloud server works with the concept of virtualization. With this, all those services are accesses through virtualization technology.
  • Physical Cloud Server: In this type, a physical server is logically distributed into more than one logical server. In addition, those logical servers can have a different OS and UI (User Interface) by which they offer services to multiple sites. Technically these types of servers are literally known as the dedicated cloud server.

Although, cloud business server can offer greater benefits to the newly started business website it lacks to keep up the site’s need when it starts to grow. Yes! You heard it right, cloud business server will not be a wise choice for the business owners who witness growth on the performance of their sites on the internet.

Benefits of Cloud Business Server

  • Increased Scalability- Cloud hosting allows an easy and instant increase in CPU and RAM, increasing scalability when and when your website traffic increases.
  • Data Security- The main concern of every small or large business and industry, is data security. One data break and other cybercrime can destroy revenue, customer loyalty, and company brand positioning. Thus, cloud hosting offers many advanced security features that guarantee that data is stored and handled safely.
  • Increased Collaboration - Cloud hosting increases team collaboration that eventually increases productivity. Teams in various places around the world can easily collaborate on projects without actually having to meet. Easy sharing and real-time updates to files are facilitated, and more will be done with web conferencing for meetings.
  • Amazing Speed- Most cloud servers can offer you high speed. Cloud hosting has a low density, which helps your website increase its speed with polish. Besides easily increasing the capacity of your site, cloud hosting also enables easier load balancing between multiple server environments, which can help reduce the burden on a single server resource.
  • Flexibility- Cloud hosting offers businesses more overall flexibility compared to local server hosting. Moreover, if you need extra bandwidth, cloud hosting can fulfill that request instantly. This increased freedom and flexibility can make a significant difference to the overall efficiency of your organization.
  • Cost Savings - The most attractive feature of cloud hosting is reducing capital expenditure. The scalable billing method of cloud hosting allows users to pay for services and resources consumed.
  • Disaster Recovery- One of the main benefits of cloud hosting is that it has amazing disaster recovery services. This means that if one data center experiences blackouts, your application and data will be accessible from separate data centers. Downtime in your service causes loss of productivity, revenue, and brand reputation.

Small Business Server Hosting Vs Cloud Server Hosting

The difference between a traditional Cloud server and traditional server ‘hosting is complicated which depends on various factors unique to every client.

Cloud Server – Cloud server hosting is a new platform that offers full services for both startup and existing businesses. It offers you unlimited resource expansion, which is great if you have a fast-growing site.

Small Business Server – Small Business Server hosting is fundamentally accessible in two structures, dedicated and shared.

  • Dedicated Hosting: Dedicated hosting is an internet hosting option where companies lease entire servers, which are often, placed in data centers. It not only provides server equipment but also provides administration and other services.
  • Shared Hosting: Shared hosting is suitable for small companies, where the capacity required is relatively low. It is inflexible and cannot handle large amounts of traffic. It is very affordable and most used type of web hosting. It is also very popular among beginners on the World Wide Web. On shared hosting, you share a server with many websites and other customers

The Differences Between Cloud Server And Small Business Server Are:

1. Resilience and Elasticity

Cloud servers never go down due to any issues, no data is lost and this ensures zero downtime and maximum network uptime for your website and application. Cloud also has enough storage and server resources, including better computing power. That means your applications and software will work faster.

In a Small Business Server, there is a risk of failure and hardware failure because Small Business Server servers do not have many nodes to share the load.

2. Scalability of resources

A cloud hosting set up allows sites and accounts to add or reduce resources like bandwidth, storage, RAM, etc. from the bank of resources maintained by the network of multiple servers.

Small Business Server hosting has limited resources and rigid specifications; you cannot immediately increase resources on the server whenever needed.

3. Running Costs

With cloud servers, bandwidth, SQL storage and disk space offered are rather expensive, but these are relatively cheaper and abundant with servers.

However, in a Small Business Server model, you need to pay a fixed rate for the services whether use it or not. Small Business Server servers are generally billed monthly and you have to pay a consistent amount regardless of how many servers and resources you use.

4. Safety and security

With a cloud server, you must trust your provider for services and take adequate steps for security. Cloud security providers ensure data security through dedicated support, secure and encrypted solutions, firewalls, and facilitating backup recovery. Cloud server also provides strong security provisions and protects the website from all unwarranted virus and malware attacks and unauthorized access, etc.

In Small Business Server server, you share CPU resources and needs with other websites on the same server or maintain a dedicated server to secure sensitive information that costs very high.

5. Environment-friendly

Cloud servers are used up to the full capacity that minimizes idle time and saves both company and environmental energy.

There is a lot of energy consumption on Small Business Server servers, which, in turn, adds to the organization's energy bill as well as increases direct and indirect carbon emissions.

Small Business Server Vs Cloud Which Is Best for SMBs?

Well, it is a perfect question to be asked by the business owners to the technical experts. In real-world, every business differs from others. In addition, the requirements of businesses differ from each other. Therefore, it keeps this question out of the equation.

Depending upon the need it would be wise for the small business owners to pick and spend for the hosting. To be frank, cloud server might cost a lot since it mostly managed at the host provider end and for SMBs it is too expensive for spend such amount for the start-up website. Meanwhile, after 4 to 5 years moving towards cloud would suits better for certain business both in performance wise and as well as economic wise.

It is truly upon the SMBs decision whether to invest in hosting by choosing either a small business server or cloud server platform. However, it is important to engage with a reliable and trustworthy service provider. SMBs must ensure about engaging with the top-notch hosting solution providers just as the eWebGuru offers for its clients over the years.

The Indian web hosting company eWebGuru offers both small business server and cloud server hosting for an affordable price. Being in the hosting industry for more than 15 years, eWebGuru manages to avail high reputation factor among its clients by offering quality web hosting and other web-oriented services. Currently, eWebGuru rated as one among the most trusted and reliable host service providers in India and posses more than 200,000 clients so far. Having a superior server network and superior server hardware, eWebGure guarantees 99.9% uptime to their clients, which is the best average uptime in the hosting industry.

So, if you are planning to hire a host service provider, consider getting in touch with eWebGuru.