Posted on August 13th, 2010The Cloud is a very popular discussion topic right now, and cloud hosting is said to be the revolutionary hosting technology that will solve all of the current problems in this area. Even though you may not know what the words “cloud hosting” mean, you have most probably already seen the technology in action. If you use Gmail for your email needs, Google Docs to create and store documents and Facebook or Flickr to save your photos online, you are already taking advantage of cloud hosting services.
So, what exactly is cloud hosting?
As a matter of fact, cloud hosting is very similar to the current most popular hosting technology – shared hosting. The difference is that cloud hosting is an improved, more large scale implementation of this older technology, and instead of allowing companies to host multiple separate clients and web sites on a single physical machine, it allows them to host a virtually unlimited number of sites and client accounts on any amount of physical servers, interconnected together to form a large virtual operating environment.
The advantages to this approach are obvious: the technology lets data centers have more clients on less servers that consume less power and can always be online with no need for regular shutdowns for maintenance. That is because new machines and hardware can be installed and removed from the cloud on the fly, without affecting any client’s web sites and data.
The processing power is also distributed much more effectively. In shared hosting, some physical servers are more loaded than others, and there’s nothing the hosting company can do about it, but cloud hosting allows them to distribute resources from a much larger pool, and have all of the servers be constantly fully loaded, which allows them to use less machines and save millions of dollars on energy costs alone. And of course, they can always connect additional servers if the cloud needs more processing power.
Who should use cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting is literally good for everyone, from individuals just starting a site to large companies that need power and reliability. A lot of web sites hosted on shared hosting accounts and even dedicated servers have had problems with sudden increases in traffic (which can be a result of getting to the front page of Digg, a popular page on Facebook or other social networks). Their account has gone past the allocated resources limit or the server simply crashed due to overload.
This can’t happen in cloud hosting, not if you choose the right type of account anyway. That is because you can always increase and decrease the amount of resources allocated to your sites on the fly, in mere minutes, and the limit is so high it might as well not be there. If you see that your current virtual machine (hosted on the cloud) is overloaded with traffic, you can quickly add a couple more processing cores and GB of RAM and that’s it, problem solved. Of course, you’ll pay more for the time you use more resources, but once the traffic has leveled off, you can reduce the resources to the previous amounts. Pretty amazing, don’t you think?
What benefits are there to cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting has a lot of benefits, as you can figure out from the above explanation, and the biggest ones are scalability and reliability. Cloud hosting is reliable because your data is stored in multiple copies on more than a few servers in the cloud (or at least good hosting companies do that), so if a hard drive fails, your data is still intact and online, and you don’t even notice anything.
The second factor, scalability, is important for anyone who thinks that their website will grow in the future. Usually, with the growth of a website, owners had to switch to better dedicated servers, then rent load balancers, multiple servers specifically for the database and the site, and even rent whole rows of servers in data centers. All of this was of course, very time consuming and expensive, and while the switch was in progress, the site was always offline, which meant lost profits.
In cloud hosting, you can adjust the amount of resources to as much as you need and pay for them just like you pay for utilities. No need to move databases and all the data to new machines and set up everything all over again every time you do so. Data centers will sooner or later switch completely to cloud hosting and the amount of machines powering a cloud will be so high that you’ll never have to worry about lack of processing power ever again.
As you can see, you will definitely benefit from choosing a cloud hosting package from a reputable hosting company (Softlayer, Rackspace, Cari.net – to name a few). If you can, you should probably wait a few years for the technology to get cheaper and solve all the issues, but if you are planning on moving a growing site now, you’ll definitely be better off choosing a cloud server instead of multiple dedicated servers.