Cloud Website Hosting Explained

What is cloud hosting actually? The term 'cloud' appears to be quite trendy in today's information technology, World Wide Web and hosting lingo. Yet, only a few actually are familiar with what cloud hosting is. Possibly it is a smart idea to educate yourself about cloud hosting services. To render a quite long tale concise, we will first let you in on what cloud hosting is not.

1. Cloud Hosting is Not Confined to a Remote Data Storage Solely.

1. Offering a remote data storage service, which involves one data storage appliance for all customers, does not convert any given hosting service provider into an authentic cloud hosting vendor.

The cPanel web hosting firms call the ability to distribute remote file storage solutions a cloud hosting solution. Up until now there is nothing wrong with the cloud designation, but... we are discussing web hosting services, not remote disk storage services for private or corporate purposes. There's constantly one "but", isn't there? It's not enough to name a shared hosting solution, powered by a one-server web hosting environment, exactly like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" service. This is so because the remaining pieces of the whole hosting platform must be functioning in precisely the same way - this does not apply solely to the remote data storage. The remaining services entailed in the entire hosting process also must be remote, separated and "clouded". And that's very problematical. A very small number of service providers can truly attain it.

2. It Entails Domains, Mail Accounts, Databases, File Transfer Protocols, Web Hosting Control Panels, and so on.

Cloud hosting is not restricted to a remote disk storage exclusively. We are discussing a hosting solution, serving countless domain names, online portals, email boxes, etc., are we not?

To name a web hosting service a "cloud hosting" one requires a lot more than delivering simply remote data storage mounts (or possibly physical servers). The e-mail server(s) need to be dedicated only to the email linked services. Executing nothing different than these particular procedures. There might be only one or perchance a whole pack of mail servers, depending on the total server load produced. To have a genuine cloud hosting solution, the remote database servers should be performing as one, regardless of their actual number. Doing nothing different. The same goes for the customers' web hosting CPs, the FTP, etc.

3. There are Cloud Domain Name Servers (DNSs) as well.

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of an actual cloud hosting company will support numerous datacenter locations on different continents.

Here's an illustration of a Domain Name Server of a true cloud hosting services provider:

dns1.idocky.com

dns2.idocky.com

If such a Domain Name Server is provided by your hosting services provider, it's not a sure thing that there is a cloud hosting platform in use, but you can absolutely be convinced when you spot a Domain Name Server such as the one underneath:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud hosting platform. This type of DNS only manifests that the web hosting environment in use is one-server based. Possibly it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-single-server hosting solution and maintains a market share of more than 98 percent. In cPanel's case, one physical machine copes with all web hosting services (web, electronic mail, DNS, databases, FTP, web hosting Control Panel(s), web site files, and so on).

Remote File Storage - The Warped Definition of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting service is not restricted solely to a remote data storage service, as a lot of hosting corporations wish it was. Sadly for them, if that was the case, the majority of the file hosting corporations would have been categorized as cloud hosting ones a long time back! They are not categorized as such, because they plainly distribute file web hosting services, not cloud web hosting services. The file web hosting platform looks indeed very simple, in comparison with the web hosting platform. The remote disk storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, because it's merely one small fraction of the entire cloud hosting platform. There's a lot more to be found in the cloud hosting platform: the CP cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the FTP cloud, the mail cloud and... in the upcoming future, possibly a couple of brand new clouds we presently are not aware of will appear out of the blue.