If you’ve been building a website or managing any aspect of your business’ IT for the past decade, you’ve heard the buzz building about “cloud hosting.” The idea of storing your personal and company information in no one definite location is taking leaps and bounds – growing like never before. Where is the future of cloud hosting going? No one is exactly sure, but it seems more and more likely that soon, AI will be used in most aspects of keeping your data stored, secured, and accessible easily when you need it.
A brief history of data storage
If there is one thing that anyone who has ever dealt with a computer knows about is lost data. Whether it’s a document, an image, or an entire program – you go to look for something and it’s missing. Either from an update, or another user has deleted or misplaced it. Or perhaps it’s a virus. Or maybe you just didn’t save it before you closed it. Whatever the reason, if you’ve ever been on a computer, chances are, you’ve lost something on that computer.
For decades, computer engineers have designed bigger internal storage, faster processors, and easier ways to take your data with you. From floppy disks to CDs to flash drives, people want their data to be portable.
So, what is cloud hosting? The ultimate in portability, and the solution for the future to many of the problems of the past.
Cloud Hosting is not in one place
Unlike a USB flash drive, that you can hold in your hand, or your desktop’s hard drive, which you can knock your finger against, “cloud hosting” is not data storage in a single place.
Across the world, there are servers that store website information, email and company databases, and other data that makes the world go round. At any given moment, some of them are operating while others are not, and that changes at every moment as information is sent back and forth based on the actions of people around the world. Every click of a mouse causes a ripple effect.
Instead, cloud hosting means storing some of the data in one place and some in another, arranging the data based on putting it closest to where it is most requested. The information can quickly and easily be moved between servers, based on the needs of the people using it.
Problems solved by cloud hosting
In the old days, servers would get overburdened if one of the websites that was stored on them was having incredibly heavy traffic. Remember when your favorite website would crash all the time? It’s becoming less of a problem now. As parts of websites are stored on different servers, it prevents any one processing system from becoming overloaded by a single channel – a single website or section of its storage. This provides not only more efficient results for the owner of the website, but for every other website owner whose site is hosted on the same server, and ever user of any of the websites on that server.
It may seem strange to consider keeping the information close to the places where it needs to be used most, the locations where it’s most requested. We think that in the digital age there is “nothing” that gets sent from one side of the world to another, but electronic information is still “something.’ It requires energy. It requires an entire network of electrical components and computer systems that it will be able to work within. Each link in the chain is a potential problem, so eliminating as many potential problems means efficiency for the people who are trying to access the information. The people who are asking it to be moved from one place in the world to another.
So what is cloud hosting worth?
You’re wondering what good does cloud hosting do? Well, in addition to keeping your website up and running, storing your company data in the cloud can create an automatically backed up database, preventing against losing data from on-site damage. Prevent someone from breaking into your office and stealing your computers in an effort to gain sensitive or lucrative data. It simply won’t be there. Additionally, what is cloud hosting is a greater storage capacity than most companies can have on their own. Cloud hosting is an assurance that your data will be protected, backed up, and secure from damage to your physical business.
