As a website owner, you would certainly want dedicated computing resources for your website. However, it can be a costly affair. Hence, many site owners turn to shared hosting. In a non-cloud environment, shared hosting, though cheaper, has a lot of performance issues since the resources are shared between multiple users and the performance of one site can adversely affect that of the others sharing the server. On the other hand, in Cloud hosting, account isolation is used to provide hosting services with guaranteed resources without the disadvantages of traditional shared hosting services.
Virtualization
In Cloud Hosting, a software is used to divide the physical resources into smaller sections called virtual servers. This software is called the Hypervisor. Each virtual server has an independent operating system, RAM, and CPU along with other computing resources. Even though they run on the same physical hardware, these virtual servers work in isolation from each other. Every website is allotted a virtual server which offers Account Isolation to the users.
If the website needs additional resources, then the provider simply adds another section to the account without any delay. This makes scalability easy and instant.
Further, since the CPU and RAM are not shared, the performance of other websites on your server will not affect your website in any way.
IP Allocation
Imagine using a traditional shared hosting plan. One of the websites on your server resorts to spam email practices in a desperate attempt to source business. Find the best email service. However, many users report his email as spam and it results in the blacklisting of the IP. Since all resources are shared, including the IP, you might not be able to send emails to those domains too for no fault of yours.
In Cloud hosting, every virtual server is assigned a separate IP thereby eliminating this concern.
Remember, traditional shared hosting plans have their own advantages too. If you have a tight budget, your business does not require you to be online 24x7x365, and you can afford occasional slow site speeds, then traditional shared hosting plans are ideal for you.
Conclusion
Account isolation allows Cloud Hosting providers to offer guaranteed resources to websites without having to pay for a dedicated hosting plan. Apart from account isolation and virtualization, cloud hosting providers pack a lot of features in their hosting plans which include instant scalability, redundant storage architecture, caching servers like Varnish Cache, CDN, etc. Choosing a hosting plan should depend on the overall requirements of your website.
We hope that this post could help you understand account isolation a little better. If you want to share your views and/or opinions, then please feel free to mention them in the comments below.