Cloud Hosting: A Great Concept To Better Your Business
Cloud hosting is not a new concept within the field of web hosting. If you have an e-mail account with Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, or if you use Flickr for sharing your photos, you are already harnessing the power of cloud hosting without even noticing it.
The Google search engine also operates in a cloud hosting environment where thousands of computers scattered across the globe achieve the single purpose of delivering quality search results to the clients.
You may already be familiar with the concept of shared web hosting in which a single server is partitioned virtually to provide web hosting space for each site hosted on it.
All the resources of the server such as hard disk storage, RAM, bandwidth, processor etc as well as the applications residing on the server are shared by all the websites residing on it.
If you need more computing resources for your website such as when your traffic increases, or you need to deploy new computationally intensive applications, the only option that you will have is to upgrade to a VPS or a dedicated hosting solution. Even with dedicated hosting, you might run out of resources with your current plan and you may have to upgrade to a higher level plan. This means that in a traditional hosting environment, there is no possibility of scaling up without migrating to a higher-level hosting platform or plan.
This turns out to be a serious limitation for individuals and businesses who need a steady expansion of the hosting services as their business grows.
Necessity is the mother of invention. The limitation mentioned above caused the major technology providers to think of an alternative hosting solution that would not only be scalable but would also provide on-demand services to its clients.
This gave birth to cloud web hosting. In the cloud hosting architecture, multiple servers are connected to one another more or less in the form of a grid, which multiplies the computational power of the cloud as compared with the single server scenario. Also, since each server in the cloud has its own set of applications, the access to a wide variety of applications is also possible along the way. This provides a much greater level of scalability in that the hardware and software resources can be exploited by the client as and when required.
The billing scheme of the cloud hosting platform is also different from that of a shared, VPS or dedicated hosting solution. The web hosting client only pays for the actual usage of resources, which is very similar to a utility bill or a pay-as-you-go mobile phone.
This can be really useful for you no matter how much variation there is in the traffic levels of your website. With a dedicated hosting server, you pay a fixed fee independent of your traffic levels.
With a cloud hosting architecture on the other hand, you pay less when you have less traffic and more when there is a sudden surge in the level of your traffic. Similar is the case when you need more applications.
In a cloud hosting architecture, the networked servers do not need to be in the same data center, instead they can be physically present at any location around the globe. This allows for a greater level of flexibility for the cloud hosting company. However, it also necessitates the acquisition of premium bandwidth connectivity to the Internet backbone by the cloud host. Any website residing on the cloud hosting platform has the potential to fulfill its computational requirements by spreading across the resources of the entire cloud. This translates to an instant availability of resources from the pool, and an even distribution of the load across the entire network in the case of a traffic spike.
It also leads to a greater level of redundancy, since the cloud works as a whole and so the failure of any component within a server or even the complete failure of a server for that matter would not affect any of the hosted websites. Also, because of being usage-based as already mentioned, the most commonly quoted benefits of cloud web hosting are scalability and cost effectiveness.
Cloud hosting gives its customers the peace of mind that their websites will never be down owing to a crash of the hosting server. Because of its ability to offer computing power on demand, cloud hosting is getting increasingly popular with entrepreneurs, small businesses, as well as big enterprises alike.
Despite its growing popularity, there are also certain concerns related with the cloud web hosting service. The primary question arises about the safety and security of the data itself. This is because the cloud hosting customer shares the same physical hardware with other customers, similar to the shared hosting scenario.
Another concern of secondary importance is the actual location of the data. With a cloud hosting platform, you no longer have control over where your data actually resides within the cloud. Furthermore, there is also another potential effect cloud hosting can have on the IT industry. These days, more and more companies are entering the cloud web hosting market by renting the resources of a cloud hosting environment owned by giant multi billion pound companies.
When cloud hosting companies choose to go with such streamlined computer systems in a cloud hosting architecture, their IT needs are reduced dramatically. This is because the hardware requirements on the company’s end squeeze, which leads to a lesser need of professionals and technical personnel to maintain the software and the hardware respectively.
Although this has the potential to reduce the number of IT jobs on the company’s end, some experts contend that this will lead to a greater demand on the cloud hosting environment end. Research in the cloud hosting and cloud computing field continues to this day with the major multi billion pound investors being Google, IBM, and Microsoft.
Joyce H. Pigao
For facts with respect to Cheap Reseller Hosting or UK Reseller Hosting, visit the Writer’s Site directly!
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