What Precisely is Cloud Hosting?

What is cloud hosting indeed? The term 'cloud' appears to be very trendy in today's computing, Internet and hosting phraseology. Yet, just a select few really can say what cloud hosting is. Maybe it is a clever idea to inform yourself about cloud hosting services. To render a very lengthy tale concise, we will first tell you what cloud hosting is not.

1. Cloud Hosting is Not Confined to a Remote Disk Storage Exclusively.

1. Furnishing a remote data storage solution, which comprises one data storage appliance for all users, does not convert any particular hosting provider into a real cloud hosting company.

The cPanel web hosting vendors name the ability to offer remote data storage services a cloud hosting solution. So far there is nothing bad about the cloud designation, but... we are discussing hosting services, not remote disk storage services for private or business purposes. There's invariably one "but", isn't there? It's not enough to call a shared web hosting solution, based on a one-server hosting platform, precisely like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" solution. That's because the other parts of the whole hosting platform must be operating in exactly the same manner - this does not apply only to the remote data storage. The rest of the services entailed in the entire hosting procedure also have to be remote, isolated and "clouded". And that's quite problematical. A very meager number of web hosting vendors can truly achieve it.

2. It Entails Domains, Mail Aliases, Databases, File Transfer Protocols, Web Hosting CPs, and so on.

Cloud hosting is not confined to a remote disk storage exclusively. We are discussing a hosting solution, serving a lot of domains, web portals, e-mail addresses, etc., right?

To name a hosting service a "cloud hosting" one demands a lot more than offering only remote disk storage mounts (or possibly physical servers). The mail server(s) have to be dedicated just to the e-mail associated services. Performing nothing else than these specific procedures. There might be only one or perchance a whole cluster of mail servers, determined by the overall server load generated. To have a true cloud hosting solution, the remote database servers should be performing as one, regardless of their real amount. Doing nothing else. The same is valid for the customers' hosting CPs, the FTP, and so on.

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

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a real cloud hosting services provider will support multiple server farm locations on multiple continents.

Here's an illustration of a DNS of a true cloud hosting supplier:

dns1.www.byohosting.com

dns2.www.byohosting.com

If such a DNS is offered by your web hosting company, it's not a sure thing that there is a cloud web hosting environment in use, but you can definitely be certain when you spot a Domain Name Server like the one below:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud web hosting service. This sort of Domain Name Server simply indicates that the web hosting platform in use is one-single-server based. Probably it's cPanel. cPanel is a single-server web hosting platform and has a market share of more than 98%. In cPanel's case, one physical machine copes with all web hosting services (web, mail, DNS, databases, FTP, hosting CP(s), files, etc.).

Remote File Storage - The Warped Explanation of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting solution is not limited only to a remote file storage service, as a lot of web hosting firms wish it was. Unluckily for them, if that was the case, the majority of the file hosting corporations would have been classified as cloud web hosting ones a long time back! They are not referred to as such, because they merely deliver file hosting solutions, not cloud hosting services. The file web hosting platform seems indeed quite plain, in comparison with the web hosting platform. The remote data storage platform is not a cloud hosting platform. It cannot be, because it's only one simple fragment of the entire cloud web hosting platform. There's plenty more to be encountered in the cloud web hosting platform: the hosting Control Panel cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the FTP cloud, the e-mail cloud and... in the near future, perhaps a couple of new clouds we presently don't know about will spring up out of nowhere.