Cloud Hosting Wiki

[DLow]

What is cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting is a web hosting service delivered from a group of connected servers. The term cloud hosting (also called clustered hosting) is not precisely defined yet. In general, however, a hosting service can be considered cloud hosting when it is delivered from a fully redundant, multi-server system, in which the resources are dynamically scalable and often virtualized.
In less technical terminology, cloud hosting uses a number of servers all connected together (a cloud), and sites on the servers can use resources from all the servers in that cloud. Processing power, hard drives, and memory are shared. Servers can be easily added or removed as necessary, and if one server is down, sites use resources from other servers instead.




How Cloud hosting works:
A cloud hosting service is usually delivered from a load-balanced cluster server platform, while the data is stored in a SAN (Storage Area Network).
Cloud hosting providers measure compute cycles, an indicator which measures how much processing time applications require. This enables cloud hosting to be provided and billed as a part of a different service model than that used by other web hosting services. Clients pay for actual resources needed.



Advantages of cloud hosting:

• You pay for only the resources you need.
• It provides good scalability. You can easily increase or decrease resources without moving sites to other servers.
• Servers can be deployed instantly.
• It provides better uptime than other types of web hosting.
• Traffic spikes aren't a problem; the cloud can handle them.
• If the servers are in different datacenters, datacenter problems can be less of a concern.
• Different technologies can be used together that can't be used together without cloud hosting. For example, .php and .asp files can work on the same site, even in the same folder, drawing on technologies within the cloud.
• You don't need to install hardware or software. Instead, you connect with a cloud that has the hardware or software you need.

Disadvantages of cloud hosting:

• Lack of root access means less control.
• Sites using cloud hosting can still have downtime if the connections between servers aren't working.
• As a relatively new service, it doesn't have a long track record.
• It isn't widely offered or used.

This was a very good read i came across on WHT & Wanted to share with WJ.

 

[SplitIce]

clustered hosting is a level below cloud an instead refers to where your site may be served on any one of a set of machines (as apposed to transparent resource balancing).

Clusters:
- Do not necessarily have a central SAN store. They are usually used to run high profile websites like Facebook and hence usually use local storage for files (with networked DB / data stores)
- No instant deployment etc, they arent virtualized.
- Usually refers to bare metal non VPS's although it is possible to make a cluster out of VPSs just that there is usually no benifit.


Other than that informative and fairly accurate, good job in explaining something so many struggle with.