There are a number of benefits to cloud hosting, some of which might not directly apply to your business model. The following five benefits of application hosting are those that can certainly apply to every company and the way that they conduct business in the increasingly competitive world that we all live in.

1. Lowered Hardware and Software Investment Costs
Cloud hosting effectively removes the need that your business might otherwise have for large servers. Servers and the maintenance of your servers can be incredibly expensive. Another consideration in terms of cost reductions is that cloud hosting reduces your need to purchase potentially costly software upgrades. Your managed hosting company will shoulder all of the costs to ensure that your dedicated servers are up-to-date and that the version of the application you are using is the most recent.

2. Increased Speed
Because the servers that your applications are hosted on are dedicated to your business needs, you'll notice that the amount of time needed to bring up your application on your laptop or desktop computer is decreased dramatically. Even hosting locally can result in a lot of time spent waiting for the application to load, which then can result in a loss of productivity for your staff.

3. Growth, As Needed
As your need for storage grows, you'll be able to add on extra processing power, extra RAM, and other needed resources as you need them. This means that when you are looking into the costs of managed hosting, you can invest in packages that offer you just enough for now, and then add resources later on as you need them. This type of flexibility can also offer you the potential for significant savings.

4. Lowered Maintenance Costs
Remote application hosting will mean that your business doesn't have the need to have as much hardware onsite. This can result in a decrease in the need to maintain hardware, which can also result in not needing to hired dedicate IT staff. Because cloud hosting uses fewer physical resources at your place of business, you will have less in the way of hardware to maintain, and you will also see a decrease in your over operational costs.

5. Backups - Data Security
One of the key benefits of cloud hosting is that they have exceptional disaster recovery services in place. This means that if one data center experiences an outage, your application and data will be accessible from a separate data center. On the user end you may experience nothing more than a brief delay logging into your application, as the disaster recovery services kick in to ensure that your backed up data is readily available to you when you need it.

There are some definite benefits to cloud hosting, for companies of all sizes. It is worth taking the time to consider just how cloud hosting can make a positive difference in your company's ability to be efficient in all areas of professional excellence. You'll see an increase in productivity, a decrease in IT expenses, and an increase in operational flexibility.