What is cloud hosting? And why multi-cloud hosting is the future : Definition from Digimagg

In July 2018, Amazon incurred an estimated loss of US$100 million due to an hour-long downtime during its Prime Day Sales. In August 2020, server outages impacted Google, affecting both the company and the productivity of businesses relying on its tools. Another global outage in May 2021 temporarily disrupted 10% of the internet, impacting eCommerce giants like Amazon and eBay.

In response to such potentially damaging incidents, cloud hosting has evolved. In our interconnected world, businesses depend on a reliable global web infrastructure offering advanced website security and business continuity. While 100% uptime cannot be guaranteed, multi-cloud hosting comes close.

For those considering website creation, opting for a hosting solution with multi-cloud hosting ensures reliability and site performance. In this article, we delve into multi-cloud hosting and its suitability for businesses of all sizes, from enterprises to small businesses.

Understanding Your Requirements for Web Hosting

When selecting the most suitable web hosting option, it's crucial to understand the distinctions between various types available, as each offers unique features and benefits that may or may not align with your requirements.

Historically, many novice website creators favored shared hosting, where multiple sites are hosted on one server. This cost-effective option is suitable for small sites, such as personal websites, with modest traffic volumes.

As websites and businesses grow, medium-sized businesses often explore alternatives like VPS hosting, which provides a private, dedicated space and resources on a shared server. While less susceptible to traffic surges, VPS hosting tends to be more expensive than shared hosting. However, it may not be suitable for enterprises or busy eCommerce sites and lacks the reliability of dedicated web servers.

Cloud hosting, on the other hand, has evolved to accommodate websites of all sizes. Offering the ability to manage sudden traffic spikes, ensure 99.9% uptime, eliminate single points of failure, and scale with your website, cloud hosting is a versatile option. Some providers, like Wix, even offer cloud hosting at no cost. For a detailed comparison of cloud hosting versus shared hosting, refer to our guide.

Understanding Cloud Hosting

Web hosting involves storing your website on a physical server and delivering it to users' browsers. Cloud hosting operates similarly, but your site is hosted on a network of virtual servers instead of a physical one, as part of the broader concept of cloud computing. Public cloud services and hosting providers like Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, and Amazon EC2 offer cloud hosting options, each with varying reliability and costs. Cloud hosting offers advantages over non-cloud hosting, such as increased flexibility in terms of storage and bandwidth scalability to accommodate short-term surges or long-term business growth.

What is multi-cloud hosting?

Multi-cloud hosting enhances traditional cloud hosting by providing enterprise-grade performance and reliability to businesses of all sizes and locations. With multi-cloud hosting, your hosting provider integrates public cloud services such as Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS) with private and in-house servers to host your website. Additionally, the provider actively manages potential outages and distributes traffic loads across networks and servers.

The primary advantage of multi-cloud hosting is reliability, ensuring that your website remains operational without any intervention on your part. For instance, Wix's multi-cloud hosting solution utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Wix's own servers. In the event of a temporary outage on AWS, websites hosted on AWS would seamlessly switch to Google Cloud. If both AWS and Google Cloud experience issues, Wix's in-house servers would take over hosting responsibilities, ensuring uninterrupted business operations.

Benefits of Multi-Cloud Hosting

When beginning to build your website, it's essential to explore the advantages of multi-cloud hosting. Here, we outline the benefits of multi-cloud hosting for websites of various sizes.

Simplified Management

Multi-cloud hosting entails complex management and substantial expenses to connect various public and private clouds. Fortunately, opting for a multi-cloud hosting service grants you the advantages of this technology without the need to invest your own time or resources. Most multi-cloud hosting providers offer automatic website backup and recovery in the event of online outages or disasters, minimizing downtime and swiftly restoring your business online.

Tip: Wix offers fully-managed hosting and multi-cloud services, requiring minimal effort from you. With Wix, the War Room operates 24/7 to proactively address potential server and network outages, supplemented by support from Google and AWS cloud services.

Dependability and Expandability

Cloud hosting offers reliability, with providers like Wix delivering uptime rates of 99.99%, ensuring business continuity. Additionally, automatic site backup ensures that your website can quickly restore even in rare network outages, safeguarding your brand reputation during traffic spikes and server downtime.

Moreover, cloud hosting provides scalability through multi-cloud hosting, utilizing a network of internal, public, and private clouds to manage and distribute data to websites. As your website's traffic and sales increase and your business requirements evolve, multi-cloud hosting dynamically adjusts to manage sudden traffic surges through load balancing.

Enhanced Website Speed

Both users and search engines expect fast website performance. Providing a positive user experience hinges on delivering content within seconds, whether it's streaming a video or completing a purchase. Cloud hosting employs geo-clustering, positioning servers in close proximity to users via a network of content delivery networks (CDNs). This results in faster page load speeds and increased customer engagement.