What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud Hosting (often also referred to as clustered hosting) is a step up from the shared hosting infrastructure that is commonly used today. By handling security, load balancing and server resources virtually you are no longer restricted to the limits of one physical piece of hardware. In basic terms, online operations are not limited to a single server, they have access to the processing power of a number of servers that are distributed in real time.

In a physical environment, a web site (for instance) is limited to the resource constraints that is housed within the physical unit (RAM, processing power, bandwidth etc). The concept of a cloud infrastructure no longer has this limitation – you, as a customer, can purchase as much computing power as you need from a virtually inexhaustible. The nature of the infrastructure means that scaling up and down is seemless and thus spikes in traffic aren’t problematic.

Load-balancing occurs at the software level and is dynamically load-balanced across a number of servers. Servers can be added or removed from the cluster with no impact or downtime on hosted applications meaning less disruption for customers. The cloud architecture has the ability to provide small and medium enterprises the stability and resilience of a web hosting architecture that a few years ago only huge corporate organizations could obtain through huge IT expenditure.

Security...

roger's picture
Any thoughts on security? Also worth mentioning that with cloud hosting you could have .asp and .php files in the same filesystem seemlessly running together as the appropriate technologies are provisioned from within the cloud.