Is Cloud Hosting Much Faster Than Shared Hosting?

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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]It depends on the kind of hardware, available data, service plan, and latency that are involved with both of the hosting plans. While cloud hosting is generally more expensive and more powerful than shared hosting, this isn’t always the case and it isn’t helpful to generalize like this. 

If you end up with a bad hosting provider and only a little bit of data, then you can easily overwhelm your cloud hosting plan and end up with a slow site. If you play your HTML and java correctly on a shared hosting solution, you can get great speeds even with less data.

When we say “faster” or “speed,” we are referring to the way that your website will load from a user perspective. Speed in loading is absolutely critical to creating a good user experience and maintaining happy customers. If you’re trying to get people to engage with your content or customers to have good emotional experiences with your brand, you need the site to respond to the way that people interact with it. In that case, you need hosting that can deliver speed.

Cloud hosting certainly sounds cutting edge and fast. But let’s look at the way that cloud hosting and shared hosting get their speed, and the factors to consider when figuring out how fast you can expect your hosting to be.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_id=”Factors that Affect Speed”][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Contents

Factors that Affect Speed

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The Raw Hardware

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Cloud hosting and shared hosting simply name the way that the hardware is being used. Shared hosting is a single physical server that is split up among a number of different users. Cloud hosting is a virtual environment that is created from the aggregate of the resources of a number of different servers. 

This means, of course, that a cloud environment will generally offer a higher amount of data than the shared hosting environment will. The cloud environment simply has more servers to offer. Then again, you could create a cloud environment using only a few servers, and you could have a shared environment with a single very powerful physical server. But for the most part, cloud hosting environments have more available data.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Your Hosting Plan

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]But just because the environment will have more data in the case of cloud hosting does not therefore mean that you will be getting more of it. Just because the pie at Thanksgiving dinner is huge does not inherently mean you’re going to get a big slice! Sometimes a smaller pie actually gives you more to yourself than a bigger pie split among more people. 

Different host companies will offer different types of hosting plans. Your hosting plan will set parameters for the share of the data that you’ve been given. While most cloud hosting plans offer you greater data than many shared hosting plans, this isn’t always true. You might get a shared hosting plan that is extremely powerful or a cloud hosting plan that is really cheap. The available resources that your plan gets from the server will determine the available data, not the hardware itself.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Latency

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Latency is the amount of time that it takes for data to move from one location to another, or more specifically the wait time that is created by the movement of the data. If you set up a server that is halfway around the world, you get a higher latency than a server that is right next to you. Well, you usually do. Then again, you don’t know where the data has to travel. If a cloud solution has to use satellites in a different location and a shared hosting solution doesn’t then you might get less latency out of a shared hosting solution.

You can test the speed and latency of various server solutions either through their own website or from a third party access point.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

The Way Your Site is Constructed

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]The way that your code is written will do more for the speed that you have than the difference between cloud hosting and shared hosting. If you have clunky code that spreads data too thin like butter over toast, you won’t get fast loading speeds. You need clean code that doesn’t have too many trappings. This gets even more complicated when you’re writing web pages for mobile devices, and you’ll need to keep things simple and the user interface clean.

You can increase the speed of your website by writing code that is better and by removing excess code. The quicker that you can get servers to do things on the backend, the quicker 

that you can deliver the information to the user.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Uptime and Service

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]This is always something that you need to keep in mind when figuring out the speed of your site. If you have poor uptime from your service provider, then it doesn’t matter how fast things are when they are running. When your site is down, the speed is 0. Additionally, optimizing the speed of your site will sometimes come only through the kind of technical backend knowledge that can make adjustments to the software, security, and server settings. Getting a company with greater technical expertise and better customer support will help you maximize the speed of your site.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

What Your Site is Doing

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]If a cloud hosting site is trying to stream video and display a bunch of pop-up ads while a shared hosting solution is simply trying to show a blog post, the shared hosting site is going to be faster. Keep in mind that the speed that you will require for your site varies depending on what you want the site to do in the first place. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_id=”Conclusion: Finding a Fast Web Solution”][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Conclusion: Finding a Fast Web Solution

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Loading speeds matter for your customers and users. Speed keeps people interested and helps them navigate your site at speeds. But the best way to get good speed is to pay for plenty of resources from your hosting solution. Choosing cloud hosting over shared hosting can certainly give you more resources in some cases. It usually will also give you a bigger ceiling to scale your site, which can be great if you want to grow your site and remain fast over time. Check our hosting finder tool, it might help you in finding the right hosting for your website(s).[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]