Dedicated Server or Cloud Hosting? Which One is Better Suited for Startup?

The last decade has seen more startups and small businesses than ever before. While we have technological advancements to thank for it, the digital revolution has made the world a unified marketplace. In today’s times, you could be sitting in a small town in one corner of the world and availing services or purchasing products from the other side of the globe. Hence, it has become imperative for businesses to have an online presence with a website being at the heart of it. With all businesses, big and small, spending more time and resources on their digital footprint, startups need to plan their online strategy carefully. In this article, we will focus on the web hosting requirements of startups and compare the two most preferred ones – Dedicated Server and Cloud Hosting.

But, before we begin, let’s talk about what a startup typically requires from its hosting provider:

1. Cost-efficiency: Being a startup usually means limited resources. Hence, they prefer spending less on web hosting too. However, they can’t go for a hosting plan which does not support the performance of their website. Therefore, a cost-efficient and feature-rich hosting plan tops the list.
2. Resource Scalability: Being new to the business, a startup would prefer a hosting plan which can grow with its business. In simple words, a plan that allows it to deploy fewer resources when it begins and increase them as business increases. 
3. Maximum Uptime: Since a startup is new to the market, it cannot afford intermittent downtimes as that can send a wrong message to the users. Hence, the maximum uptime of the website is a critical requirement.

Having understood this, let’s compare Dedicated Servers and Cloud Hosting for startups:

Dedicated Server vs Cloud Hosting for Startups

Features	Dedicated Server	Cloud Hosting
Cost-Efficiency	Dedicated Server Hosting is costlier than Cloud Hosting because your site lives on a dedicated server. Further, you need to manage the server yourself, which usually implies additional costs.	Cloud Hosting has lower costs as compared to Dedicated Server Hosting. The best feature of Cloud Hosting is cost-scalability which means that you can upgrade plans whenever you need it.
Instant Resource Scalability	Increasing resources in a dedicated server environment is a time and cost consuming affair. This makes managing sudden traffic spikes a difficult process.	A Cloud Web Host allows you to scale up your resources instantly. This puts you in a good position to manage sudden traffic spikes.
Reliability	Being hosted on a single server, the website is susceptible to downtime if the server faces any technical issues. Having a single point of failure makes it unreliable.	A Cloud Host uses a wide network of virtual servers, adding reliability to the hosting service. Therefore, if one virtual server crashes, others step in ensuring maximum uptime.

Summing Up

As a startup, choosing the right hosting plan according to your business is essential for a well-performing website. As you can see above, Cloud Hosting offers better advantages to startups. However, dedicated server hosting offers specific benefits too. Hence, you need to assess the requirements of your website well before finalizing the plan.