What Does Cloud Website Hosting Mean?

What is cloud hosting in fact? The word 'cloud' appears to be quite fashionable in today's information technology, World Wide Web and web hosting parlance. Yet, only a few in fact can tell what cloud hosting is. Probably it is a clever idea to educate yourself about cloud hosting services. To render a quite lengthy tale short, we will firstly notify you about what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Delivering a remote disk storage service, which involves one data storage tool for all clients, does not turn any particular web hosting corporation into a real cloud hosting solutions provider.

The cPanel web hosting suppliers dub the ability to supply remote file storage services a cloud hosting solution. Until now there is nothing wrong with the cloud classification, but... we are talking about hosting solutions, not remote disk storage solutions for private or corporate needs. There's constantly one "but", isn't there? It's not enough to dub a shared hosting service, driven by a one-server hosting environment, precisely like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" solution. That's because the other parts of the entire hosting platform must be functioning in precisely the same manner - this does not relate solely to the remote file storage. The other services entailed in the whole hosting procedure also have to be remote, separated and "clouded". And that's extremely difficult. A very meager number of hosting service providers can truly do it.

2. It Includes Domain Names, Mail Aliases, Databases, File Transfer Protocols, Control Panels, etc.

Cloud hosting is not confined to a remote file storage exclusively. We are discussing a web hosting service, serving lots of domain names, sites, mail aliases, etc., right?

To name a web hosting service a "cloud hosting" one demands a lot more than furnishing solely remote data storage mounts (or probably servers). The e-mail server(s) need to be devoted just to the e-mail related services. Performing nothing else than these particular tasks. There might be just one or probably a whole cluster of electronic mail servers, depending on the total server load created. To have a true cloud hosting solution, the remote database servers should be working as one, irrespective of their actual quantity. Doing nothing different. The same goes for the customers' Control Panels, the FTP, and so on.

3. There are Cloud Domain Servers (DNSs) too.

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a true cloud hosting distributor will support multiple datacenter locations on different continents.

Here's an instance of a DNS of a genuine cloud hosting vendor:

dns1.hosting.site2seo.uk

dns2.hosting.site2seo.uk

If such a Domain Name Server is furnished by your hosting supplier, it's not a guarantee that there is a cloud web hosting platform in use, but you can definitely be confident when you observe a DNS like the one beneath:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud hosting platform. This kind of Domain Name Server only exhibits that the web hosting environment in use is one-server based. Perchance it's cPanel. cPanel is a single-server hosting platform and maintains a market share of more than 98%. In cPanel's case, one single physical server tackles all web hosting services (web, email, DNS, databases, File Transfer Protocol, hosting CP(s), web files, etc.).

Remote File Storage - The Twisted Characterization of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting service is not limited only to a remote data storage service, as numerous hosting suppliers wish it was. Unfortunately for them, if that was the case, most of the file hosting service providers would have been categorized as cloud web hosting ones a long time back! They are not classified as such, as they plainly supply file web hosting services, not cloud hosting services. The file web hosting platform looks really quite plain, in comparison with the web hosting platform. The remote disk storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, since it's merely one small fraction of the entire cloud web hosting platform. There's a lot more to be encountered in the cloud web hosting platform: the Control Panel cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the Domain Name Server cloud, the FTP cloud, the e-mail cloud and... in the foreseeable future, probably several new clouds we currently are not familiar with will come up out of nowhere.