If you make a living out of the internet you probably consider yourself a pretty safety conscious person, you know how much damage a hacked website can do both to your revenue and your reputation. The reality is that if you decide you’re going to host your own sites they are going to be much more vulnerable than if they were hosted on the cloud.

Cloud hosting is very cost effective because it means you can scale up and scale down instantly. If you suddenly have in influx in traffic you have instant access to extra space to accommodate this. If you’re hosting your own site it means you need to have that extra room on standby just in case and you’re having to pay for that extra room too. Cloud computing companies will only charge you for the space you’re using at any given time, this is why it’s sometimes called utility computing. Virtualization of your servers also means you’re not having to pay for the power to run them or cool them. Servers can take up a lot of power and energy and also require a lot to keep them cool; a cloud environment removes the need for any of that.

You’ve also got the safety side to look at too, in most cases your site will be safer being run from the cloud than it would be being hosted yourself. Reputation is everything to a cloud provider, if they suffer a data leak they know they’re going to go out of business which is why they spend so much money on research and development creating some of the most sophisticated security in the world. These providers are nothing without their reputation, let’s face it, you’re not going to trust your data with someone who couldn’t keep it safe so it’s in their interest to be as safe as possible. This is why, if your site is being hosted on the cloud, you know it’s going to be protected by far more sophisticated technology than whatever you have protecting your site at the moment.