But for the humble blogger, what does the cloud really have to offer? We take a look in this article.
A New Approach to Hosting
Traditional hosting has a huge Achilles heel: it cannot handle sudden spikes in traffic. While that was fine for the 1990s where traffic was little and the chances of stumbling into a boatload of new users were slim, in our social media driven current age, millions of users are merely a click, or rather, a YouTube share away.Cloud hosting solves this scalability problem by giving you instant access to virtually as many new servers as you want. Intelligent server technology from hosts like ElasticHosts can sense a sudden spike in traffic and automatically deploy resources to handle the load.
Bloggers often suffer from scalability issues, as anyone with an unexpected front page position on Digg or Reddit can testify. Bloggers work exceptionally hard to gain a slice of the internet pie, and each visitor lost due to server errors can cost them dearly. Cloud technology from ElasticHosts enables bloggers to scale dynamically and ensure that their site is always up, regardless of where their posts land up.
Content Delivery Revolutionized
As soon as your blog starts getting some traffic, you will have to face an altogether new problem: site speed. Serving thousands of visitors blog posts, images and videos can take a toll on the site speed, leading to a poor reader experience.The effect of site speed on conversion rates and reader loyalty has been amply demonstrated. For instance, data suggests that even a one second delay in loading a site can decrease conversions by 7%. Another study shows that pages that take longer than 4 seconds to load witness more than 25% page abandonment. So the question arises, how can you improve site speed without burning a hole in your wallet?
The answer is cloud based content deliverty networks (CDNs) such as CloudFlare. CloudFlare simply spreads your content across multiple geographic locations on its cloud platform. When a visitor visits your blog, CloudFlare directs her to the cloud server nearest to her location.
Add in cloud based cache services (that is, storing static parts of a page on the visitor's computer) and you can guarantee a massive increase in your blog speed.
Additionally, CDN services like CloudFlare monitor your blog for any suspicious activity and deflect hacking attempts. The price for small bloggers is virtually nil, while bigger, professional bloggers can get access to all CDN and security features for as low as £13.24 per month.
Storing Content Simplified
If you had any downloadable content on your blog, say an MP3 file or a video, you would be expected to pay thousands of pounds each month in file hosting fees. Those dark days are finally over, thanks to cloud storage services like ElasticHosts, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Dropbox, and Box.net.Cloud hosting based storage simplifies the process of online file storage by giving you a single, cloud-distributed platform for storing all files. Cloud server companies are also providing the ability to create server instances that are equipped with solid state drives, which increases speeds by up to 20 times. Storing and retrieving files has never been faster.
The cost of running an EC2 instance are as low as £0.04 per hour. EC2 can also be used for storing and retrieving crucial user data at faster speeds.
Conclusion
The Cloud is more than a mere buzzword; it is the single biggest innovation in file hosting and delivery technology since the dawn of the internet. It can help you become a better blogger by giving you a faster, cheaper and more scalable blog.
GrahamAbout the Guest Author:
Graham is a tech blogger who specialises in server based news and reviews.
