Cloud hosting vs dedicated hosting for your LMS

Work out which server infrastructure is best for your LMS as we compare cloud hosting vs dedicated hosting.

When you’re preparing to launch a new LMS, one of the key considerations is the best way of hosting it to maintain availability, speed, performance and security. Typically, this will involve choosing cloud hosting or dedicated hosting.

Our managed LMS hosting includes options for cloud hosting and dedicated hosting because there is no single best option. It’s a case of choosing the right LMS hosting for your budget, priorities and peace of mind.

In this article, we’ll explore both cloud hosting and dedicated hosting so you can build a picture of which is best for your LMS.

What is cloud hosting?

Cloud hosting is when your LMS is hosted in the cloud. It’s the same terminology you’ll be familiar with from websites or storage on your devices. 

What this means in practice is that your LMS shares server space and resources with other learning platforms. You get a far more powerful hosting infrastructure than would otherwise be feasible or affordable but you have to share it with others.

LMS cloud hosting setups are built to be incredibly resilient and balance the load. This helps handle the ups and downs of web traffic to meet the needs of all the platforms using the infrastructure.

What is dedicated hosting?

Dedicated hosting is when the hosting infrastructure for your LMS is dedicated solely to your organisation.

In other words, all the hosting resources available are focused on managing the uptime, speed and performance of your LMS.

Cloud hosting vs dedicated hosting

When comparing cloud hosting and dedicated hosting, we like to use an air travel analogy. 

Cloud hosting is like a passenger flight. You make sure you’re choosing the right airline, agree on a destination and book as much space as you need for your party and its luggage. Since you and your fellow passengers are pooling your resources, you all benefit from a bigger plane and a lower fare than you could achieve individually.

Dedicated hosting is like a private jet. It’s a smaller plane and it costs more, but you get absolute control over the direction of travel and you can take up as much space in the cabin and the hold as you need.

Benefits of cloud hosting

Some of the key benefits of choosing cloud hosting for your LMS are:

• Greater resources than would be feasible with dedicated servers
• Enhanced resilience
• Advanced load-balancing features
• Lower cost

Disadvantages of cloud hosting

The main disadvantage of choosing cloud hosting for your LMS is spillover issues from other sites. Problems impacting speed, performance and availability for one LMS can occasionally impact another LMS using the same hosting infrastructure.

Examples include another LMS on the same hosting setup being affected by a particularly high load or a denial-of-service (DoS) attack.

Benefits of dedicated hosting

Some of the key benefits of choosing dedicated hosting for your LMS are:

• No risk of other sites affecting performance
• 100% of resources dedicated to your LMS
• Greater control over all aspects of your hosting

Disadvantages of dedicated hosting

The main disadvantage of choosing dedicated hosting for your LMS is the higher cost associated with dedicated hosting infrastructure.

Which is better value?

If you’re looking at the situation purely from a pricing perspective, cloud hosting is cheaper than dedicated hosting. The pooled resources of cloud hosting extend to the cost. By sharing infrastructure between multiple organisations, the price becomes lower for everyone.

On the other hand, depending on your organisation’s circumstances, the additional control and certainty of a dedicated hosting setup might make more financial sense and offer better value overall.

Which is most reliable? 

No, neither dedicated nor cloud hosting is more reliable than the other. It’s about the quality of the hosting setup rather than which option you choose.

Cloud hosting has advanced resilience and load-balancing features, which can increase LMS hosting reliability. Dedicated hosting brings exclusive use of resources and protection from the impact of higher load on other sites on a cloud platform, both of which contribute to greater reliability.

Should you choose cloud hosting or dedicated hosting?

There is no right or wrong answer. It’s a case of choosing the LMS hosting setup best suited to your needs.

Cloud hosting will meet the requirements of most organisations at a lower cost than dedicated hosting. For organisations that want to be certain of the resources at their disposal and need greater control over performance, dedicated hosting might be the better option.

To discuss your organisation’s LMS hosting requirements in more detail, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch soon.

Tags