Cloud hosting - the most secure way to host your website?

The cloud is regarded as the miracle cure in the IT sector. Cloud hosting in particular is presented as the non-plus-ultra and offers customers maximum availability with minimum effort.
What exactly is hidden behind this term, whether it really is the safest option and what you should look out for is explained below.
Cloud hosting
The customer normally rents a dedicated server (managed/root server) from a web hosting provider. Customers can also rent space on such a server (shared hosting) in the data center. Websites can be hosted on these.
This offers freedom in configuration, saves a lot of work and provides a basis for reliability.
For a large website with dynamic access numbers and extreme peaks, such a solution is expensive and a complex configuration, including load balancers and round-robin DNS. Even set up in this way, the servers frequently reach their performance limits, apart from a deliberate attack.
The elastically scalable resources of a cloud provider offer a solution. These can meet even the most extreme requirements of a customer.
Agile and flexible into the future
Your own website is no longer located on a specific physical server. It is distributed and managed by the cloud provider in several data centers worldwide.
The customer can set the minimum number of instances they want to run for their website and the maximum value to which this should be dynamically increased. If the CPU load is higher than 80% for 5 seconds, for example, the system will automatically stop working. The consistency of the data is guaranteed, health checks ensure automatic troubleshooting of the virtual systems and the underlying databases can even be operated as SaaS.
Pay what you use/get
For all of this, the customer only pays for the resources actually used. All cloud providers have built-in cost controls and threshold alarms.
The three major providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Gcloud) have excellent information pages on all services and their prices. Smaller Cloud hosting providersuch as Gridscale from Cologne, can score points with personal service and retain customers.
Advantages of cloud hosting
The dynamics of the connectable resources described above and the extreme fail-safety are achieved by Concepts such as geo-redundancies expanded even further. The cloud-hosted website is not only located in one data center, but in several locations, so that a disaster in one place does not destroy the website. In addition, the data has a shorter route to the various end customers, which shortens access times.
There is a theoretical maximum of resources that can be used, but this is never reached in everyday life. If a customer wishes, they can access as much service as they want to pay for at short notice.
The availability of the website in cloud hosting is guaranteed by the provider, as set out in the SLA. It offers a number of bookable options to improve this.
On the one hand, there is load balancing, which manages any number of backend instances behind a centrally accessible address and thus distributes the load.
On the other hand, cloud firewalls are offered that keep out unwanted traffic and in some cases provide complete protection against DDoS attacks.
With the right cloud hosting partner, the customer is relieved of the responsibility of providing the necessary Security patches and software updates into its web hosting infrastructure, thereby increasing the level of security.
Conclusion
Cloud hosting is a valuable service for SMEs that do not want to maintain a CDN (Content Delivery Network) on the same level as Netflix, but want to take the next step into the digital future with the same tools.
The security of your own website increases and is shifted accordingly with the right partner. The customer leaves system security and availability to the cloud provider with guaranteed standards.
Cloud hosting is therefore the most secure option of all web hosting methods with the right partner and contract.