The way Google is proceeding to clean up the search result is very clear and honest : your blog must have unique and helpful content and it must load very fast.
To help the good content writers, Google provides free guidelines and tips in order to help the blog writers to publish articles which will be easier to to find by Google bot.
Now, Google has introduced free Page Speed Service with CDN. Though it is only for limited webmasters, it has much implications behind.
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What is the importance of Cloud Hosting for WordPress Blogs?
After the basic optimization, Page Speed becomes the most important point. We have wrote a detailed guide to set up your WordPress blog using W3 Total Cache and CloudFlare. If you notice the Web Page Test result, you will see most static contents are actually served through Cloud Hosting. With CDN, which is in fact a special type of Cloud Hosting for static files, this is leveraged.
As, content quality becoming the only point to judge, to be in the Search Engine Competition, Page Loading Speed becomes the important point.
Why Cloud hosting for WordPress blog?
Blogs are definitely a good candidate for Cloud Hosting : Traffic suddenly rises and can make the traditional servers inaccessible. To avoid this situation, you actually need to anticipate the traffic trend and use the highest affordable traditional Hosting Service. That means, if you expect 50K uniques, you are paying for that quality of server, when your traffic is actually 10K. So, with traditional hosting, we are spending our money when it is not needed.
With Cloud Hosting, it is possible to regulate the expenditure : you pay more only when your blog gets more traffic.
WordPress needs much CPU and RAM resource than a static HTML page. With Caching, we can reduce this hunger at WordPress Blog’s Front end. But, the need of resources to process the cache files or other various cron can not denied. Cloud Hosting can provide extra CPU and RAM when you are saving a 2 mb post with lot of image illustrations.
With CDN setup, we are actually covering our blog’s frontend : we can not deny how slow our back end runs! It is not possible to use CDN for php files or for the core files working at the back end.
So, the simple way is to use a cloud hosting instead.
Is not Cloud Hosting very costly?
Obviously Cloud Hosting is costlier than a shared server! But, if you compare Cloud Hosting payment rate of Dedicated Server, definitely you will find that offers of Cloud Hosting is cleaner.

Do you recommend any hosting company for Cloud Hosting?
We have no affiliation with any Cloud Hosting company, but “my personal favorite” is Rackspace. Rather recommending a brand, we will suggest you to understand the basics of Cloud Hosting from different articles we wrote on Cloud Hosting and cloud computing :
- Understand the Privacy risks with Cloud Hosting
- Hardware requirement to run Cloud Hosting
- Security issues with Cloud Hosting Services
- If you want Private Cloud Hosting : Private Cloud Hosting and Computing Solutions
- Current Trend of Cloud Hosting and Computing

Does this holds true only for WP blogs or is relevant for every website? CH would obviously be more costly that the shared one as is performance and output looks promising from your post. Neat write up there, keep penning.
It holds true for the CMS, particularly those uses php to render HTML (xHTML, HTML5 anything…) as output : WordPress, phpbbb, bbpress…any such. Static HTML page practically needs only a good server. However, if the server is a Cloud Server, even the static pages will be served fast too. In other words, it is better to think of Cloud Hosting for those who are thinking to switch to VPS or DS from Shared.
For shared or a bad VPS the dns lookup time sucks.
Thanks for the appreciations too.