How Do IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS Cloud Hosting Options Differ?

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Are you one of the American businesses planning to increase your spending on cloud computing in 2014? According to Forbes, businesses in the United States will spend over $13 billion this year on cloud computing solutions, and why not? Cloud solutions can improve your security and your IT infrastructure, all the while saving you significant amounts on your monthly technology expenditures.

Perhaps no cloud computing service is as important in 2014 as cloud hosting. After all, with $1.5 trillion expected to be spent across the web by the end of the year, as estimated by eMarketer, you need to make sure you’re accessible to your customers and that your data is always available to you. Most people realize that choosing the best cloud hosting service is important to their business, but few realize that there are many different technologies contained within the term “cloud hosting.”

How Do Cloud Hosting Services Differ?

  • Software-as-a-Service
  • SaaS cloud hosting services are unarguably the simplest type of service for most clients to use. Quite simply, they’re designed with the end user in mind, meaning their interfaces and functionality are most often designed for the layman user. As PC World points out, Google Drive is one of the most well known versions of SaaS cloud hosting providers on the market.

  • Platform-as-a-Service
  • PaaS cloud hosting services give businesses the tools they need to draft custom applications and provide services to their own users. Effectively, PaaS providers give businesses, like yours, access to virtual computers. While this means your IT team will have the ability to customize a lot of what is being offered to your users, it also means that your cloud provider will have significant control over what you can install on your server, especially when it comes to your operating system.

  • Infrastructure-as-a-Service
  • IaaS options, as the name implies, give businesses the most space to customize their cloud hosting services to match their infrastructural needs. In practice, IaaS options are very similar to PaaS, but they lack the limitations on software and operating systems that PaaS is known for. The trade-off for this added customizability is that many of the tasks that were done automatically under PaaS, like software updates, must now be handled manually by your IT team.

What About Private Versus Public Server Solutions?
Beyond the specific types of functionality offered by varied cloud hosting solution providers, you also need to consider whether it’s better for your business to use a private or public hosting solution. Public services, as Computer Weekly writes, are great because they’re cheap, readily available, and easy to scale to your business needs, whether they grow or shrink.

On the other hand, private hosting services come with their own share of benefits, the biggest of which is complete control. While you will still be renting a server from a cloud provider, no other companies will have access to your system. The trade-off here, as you might imagine, is the price.

It’s easy to think that people are talking about one thing when they talk about “cloud hosting.” However, as can be seen, there is a world of difference between each provider of these services. Links like this: Atlanta cloud solution

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