What is cloud hosting?

Cloud hosting is a web hosting service evolved from the cloud computing, which is offered from a network of “clustered” servers that are working together to offer a reliable service. Depending on the size of the cloud, the network may consist of tens or hundreds of servers that are located in the data centers that are scattered in all over the states. The companies like Amazon, Google and Yahoo offer their services over a cloud network, which delivers fault-tolerant availability.

Web hosting service offered on a traditional dedicated server encounters multiple points of hardware failure. Even with redundant hardware setup such as dual power, RAID disks, and dual LAN of a dedicated server, a dedicated server do fail time-to-time and the service outage occurs either planned or unplanned. Hardware expansions, software upgrades, and other planned maintenance all lead to bring the server down for minutes to several hours. When a dedicated server experiences an outage, your business is at risk and the reputation will be severely tarnished as visitors are unable to reach your website or experience interrupted service. Search engines also penalize your website on search rankings if outage occurs multiple times.

On the other hand, cloud hosting service is offered by a network of server resources scattered over multiple data centers and single failure will not affect your hosting service. Users can easily expand their server resources without an outage, and enjoy enhanced security, performance and high availability. Unlike traditional dedicated hosting, the cloud hosting enable you to add additional hardware resources to your server with no interruption to your business.

A video from GoGrid on cloud hosting

The following video released on YouTube helps you understand “Cloud Computing” in plain English.

Cloud Hosting Scalability

One of the biggest advantage of using cloud hosting is the scalability. As your server requirements grow, you can easily expand your server resources without worrying about physically moving your server from one machine to another. With cloud hosting, you’ll only pay for the quantity of computing resource consumed. If you don’t need your server to stay up 24×7, you can turn it off and save money. It’s like a flipping a switch to turn on or off your server; and only pay while the server is servicing the requests.