What Is Cloud Hosting? (And Why Multi-Cloud Hosting Is the Future)

April 20,2022

In July 2018, Amazon lost an estimated US$100 million after just an hour of downtime during its Prime Day Sales. In August 2020, server outages stirred Google, not only affecting the company itself, but decreasing productivity for the many businesses dependent on its ubiquitous tools. And in May 2021, another global outage temporarily brought down 10% of the internet— impacting eCommerce giants like Amazon and eBay. In the years since, cloud hosting has evolved to address potentially damaging problems such as these. We live in an interconnected world where businesses of all sizes rely on a global web infrastructure that delivers reliability and advanced website security, as well as business continuity. And while 100% uptime is never guaranteed, multi-cloud hosting delivers something very close. If you are thinking of creating a website or starting a business, choosing a hosting solution that uses multi-cloud hosting ensures reliability without compromising on site performance. Not sure what that tech-forward sentence means to you? In this article, we'll explore multi-cloud hosting and why it fits the hosting needs of all businesses—from enterprises to small businesses.

Understanding your web hosting needs

When it comes to choosing a web host, you'll need to distinguish between the different types available. Each hosting type has features and benefits which may or may not fit your needs. In the past, many first-time website creators opted for shared hosting, or when several sites are hosted on one server. This hosting option is cheap and works well for small sites, including personal websites, without large traffic numbers. Then, once the site and business start to grow, many medium-sized businesses consider a different option, like VPS hosting, or a private, dedicated space and resources on a shared server. This option is less sensitive to traffic surges on the server, but it's often more expensive than shared hosting. VPS hosting doesn't work for enterprises or busy eCommerce sites, though, and it's still not as reliable as having your own dedicated server. Cloud hosting, on the other hand, has evolved to meet website demand of all sizes. This type of hosting can manage sudden traffic surges, deliver 99.9% uptime (the most reliable hosting can get), has no single point of failure and scales with your website. And with some website creators—Wix included—it costs nothing.