Is Cloud Hosting for Websites Secure?

If you’re interested in making a WordPress site, you’re going to need web hosting. And when it comes to the different types of web hosting, cloud hosting is one of the fastest-growing hosting technologies because it offers some unique advantages over other types.

But if you’re going to be relying on “the cloud” for your hosting, you might naturally be wondering about cloud hosting security. Is it safe to host your WordPress site using cloud hosting, and how does cloud hosting security compare to the security that you get with other types of hosting?

While a large part of WordPress security depends on you following security best practices, secure hosting still plays an important role in creating a strong security foundation for your website.

So — is cloud hosting secure? In general, cloud hosting is just as secure as other hosting types and even offers some security advantages over traditional hosting. For a more complete answer, you should read this post, because we’re going to dig into everything you need to know about cloud hosting security.

You’ll learn what cloud hosting is, how it helps you create a secure website and an easy way that you can benefit from the security of cloud hosting if you’re building WordPress websites with Elementor.

What Is Cloud Hosting?

In the past, hosting was oriented around a single physical server. You might share resources with other accounts on that server (shared hosting) or you might have some or all of the server’s resources dedicated to your account (VPS or dedicated hosting, respectively).

The key detail, though, is that everything was happening on that single physical server.

Cloud hosting changes that by using a network of computers to provide hosting services instead of a single physical server — AKA “the cloud”.

If you were to sign up with a cloud hosting service directly, you would choose what resources you want for your account and then the service would allocate those resources to you in the cloud.

There are a lot of benefits to this cloud hosting approach:

• Easy scalability – you can find hosting packages for all different traffic and resource requirements, from ones suited to personal blogs all the way up to enterprise-ready packages.
• Improved reliability and uptime – because there’s no single point of failure in cloud hosting, you can expect improved reliability and uptime.
• Flexible pricing – similar to the scalability benefits, you can find cloud hosting at all different pricing levels, from a few dollars per month up to thousands per month depending on the resources.
• Excellent performance – cloud hosting uses modern technologies and data centers to offer top-notch performance. For example, if your site is hosted on Google Cloud Platform, you’re getting access to the same infrastructure that powers Google Search and YouTube. Google Cloud Platform also has one of the largest backbone networks in the world, which gives it a performance edge that most other hosts can’t match.

The potential downside of cloud hosting, however, is that purchasing cloud hosting directly from a cloud provider can be complex if you’re not a developer (or even if you are a developer who doesn’t want to spend time being a sysadmin).

If you sign up directly with a cloud hosting provider, you’ll be responsible for configuring and maintaining your hosting environment, which is out of reach for most WordPress users.

To get around this roadblock while still receiving the benefits of cloud hosting, you can instead use a service that’s built on top of cloud hosting.

For example, Elementor Hosting uses Google Cloud Platform infrastructure, but it does so in a way that you never need to interact with the hosting itself. Instead, you just sign up and start building your site with WordPress and Elementor.

Elementor Hosting also adds additional security enhancements, such as SSL certificates, automatic backups, and site lock.

Speaking of security enhancements – let’s next discuss the security of cloud hosting itself.

Is Cloud Hosting Secure?

Examining the security of any hosting environment can be tricky because there are a lot of variables that go into creating a secure WordPress website.

In short, the answer is yes — cloud hosting is secure and able to offer security benefits that go beyond traditional hosting. We’ll discuss these in the next section.

However, it’s important to note that no type of web hosting can guarantee security by itself.

Secure hosting can help you mitigate certain types of threats, but even the most secure hosting can be vulnerable if you’re not implementing security best practices yourself.

In fact, many of the common attack vectors that will affect WordPress sites aren’t necessarily dependent on the security of your web hosting. Here are some common examples:

• Vulnerabilities in plugins or core – malicious actors can exploit vulnerabilities in your WordPress plugins or the WordPress core software. This is especially problematic if you’re installing a lot of plugins from unreliable developers.
• Out-of-date extensions – if you don’t promptly apply updates to the WordPress core, plugins, and themes, that gives malicious actors another chance to exploit vulnerabilities.
• Login security – malicious actors can brute force your login page, intercept login credentials if you’re not using an SSL certificate, or find other ways to access your WordPress dashboard.

If you want to keep your site secure, you’ll need to put in the effort to make sure you’re following WordPress security best practices such as using strong passwords, installing an SSL certificate, promptly applying updates, only using high-quality plugins, etc.

With that being said, secure hosting still plays a key role in protecting your site from malicious actors. So, let’s next discuss the security benefits of using cloud hosting.

Security Benefits of Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting can offer additional security benefits to traditional web hosting. The hardware’s configuration can provide further site protection, including firewalls, DDoS prevention, and server isolation:

• Accounts are isolated – cloud hosting uses virtual server isolation to ensure that your account is kept completely separate from other accounts on the cloud network. This means that you don’t have to worry about issues with other sites affecting your account like you would with shared hosting.
• No single point of failure – because cloud infrastructure is a distributed network, there’s no single point of failure like there is with a single physical server.
• Multiple firewalls – cloud providers typically add multiple levels of firewalls to their networks to protect against threats.
• Better protection against DDoS attacks – in a DDoS attack, a malicious actor spams the target website with traffic to overload the hosting hardware and take down the site. Because the hardware in cloud hosting is distributed across a network instead of a single physical server, it can offer better protection against these types of attacks.
• Compliance standards – cloud providers are usually able to adhere to strict government compliance standards. For example, Google Cloud Platform complies with a number of security standards from governments around the world. 

Another security benefit of cloud hosting is that you’re typically working with some of the largest infrastructure providers in the world. A traditional web host just isn’t able to offer the same type of infrastructure protection that you get with the big-name tech giants.

For example, Google Cloud Platform adds the following security checks to its infrastructure:

• Strong encryption – Google Cloud fully encrypts data both in transit and at rest.
• Dedicated operations teams – Google has teams working 24/7/365 to detect and stop malicious actors.
• Hardware security – Google implements physical security measures at multiple levels, such as preventing physical access to data centers, using custom security chips, and more.

Again, Google Cloud Platform is the same infrastructure that Google uses for its own services, so you can bet that they’ve designed it with security in mind.

Security Benefits of Elementor Hosting

If you’re building your website with WordPress and Elementor, you can use Elementor Hosting to get the security benefits of cloud hosting along with other features and protections to secure your site.

Elementor Managed Hosting is an all-in-one website solution with built-in hosting that uses the Google Cloud Platform.

All you need to do is sign up and you can start creating your website right away using all of the features in Elementor Pro.

Because Elementor Hosting uses Google Cloud Platform, you still get access to the strong cloud hosting security foundation that Google Cloud Platform offers.

Elementor Hosting also adds some of its own security enhancements to further secure your WordPress website:

• Free SSL certificates – Elementor Hosting offers a free SSL certificate from Cloudflare so that you can encrypt the data that passes between visitors’ browsers and your website.
• Cloudflare firewall – in addition to the firewall from Google Cloud Platform, Elementor Hosting adds another firewall from Cloudflare to block malicious traffic with more targeted rules and protections.
• DDoS protection – Elementor Hosting extends Google Cloud Platform’s built-in DDoS protections with additional protection from Cloudflare.
• Automatic backups – Elementor Hosting automatically backs up your site’s data every day, which means your data is always secure no matter what happens.
• Site locks – to protect your site while you’re working on it, you can add a site lock so that visitors need to enter a pin code to access your site.

Try Cloud Hosting Today

If you want to avoid security issues on your WordPress site, it’s important to follow WordPress security best practices.

While many of these best practices will depend on your own actions (such as only installing high-quality plugins and keeping them updated), choosing secure WordPress hosting is also an important piece of the puzzle.

Because of the way that cloud hosting operates, it’s able to offer security benefits that go above and beyond traditional hosting, which makes it a great choice for security-conscious WordPress users.

Your account is isolated from others on the network and there’s no single point of failure. Beyond that, cloud hosting providers such as Google Cloud Platform use strong encryption and firewalls to further protect your sites. In fact, you’ll be benefiting from the same types of security strategies that Google uses for its own products.

If you’re looking for the easiest way to benefit from cloud hosting’s security on WordPress, you can use Elementor Hosting.

Elementor Hosting uses Google Cloud Platform, but it offers an all-in-one approach that lets you avoid interacting directly with cloud hosting itself. To learn more and get started, click here.