What Precisely is Cloud Website Hosting?

What is cloud hosting actually? The word 'cloud' seems to be quite fashionable in today's IT, World Wide Web and hosting lingo. Yet, only a select few actually know what cloud hosting is. Perchance it is a smart idea to inform yourself about cloud hosting services. To make a very long story brief, we will firstly let you in on what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Providing a remote disk storage service, which involves one disk storage device for all customers, does not turn any specific hosting supplier into an authentic cloud hosting solutions provider.

The cPanel web hosting vendors dub the ability to provide remote disk storage solutions a cloud hosting solution. So far there is nothing bad about the cloud designation, but... we are discussing website hosting services, not remote disk storage services for private or corporate purposes. There's invariably one "but", isn't there? It's not enough to call a shared web hosting solution, driven by a one-single-server web hosting platform, exactly like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" service. That's because the remaining components of the whole hosting platform must be operating in precisely the same way - this does not apply only to the remote data storage. The rest of the services involved in the whole web hosting process also have to be remote, separated and "clouded". And that's extremely hard. Very few web hosting firms can actually achieve it.

2. It Includes Domains, Mail Accounts, Databases, File Transfer Protocols, Hosting Control Panels, etc.

Cloud hosting is not restricted to a remote file storage solely. We are talking about a hosting service, serving countless domain names, online portals, email aliases, etc., are we not?

To call a hosting service a "cloud hosting" one calls for a lot more than supplying solely remote data storage mounts (or probably servers). The email server(s) need to be devoted solely to the mail linked services. Executing nothing else than these particular tasks. There might be only one or possibly an entire cluster of mail servers, based on the total server load produced. To have a genuine cloud hosting solution, the remote database servers should be operating as one, irrespective of their real quantity. Executing nothing else. The same is valid for the customers' hosting Control Panels, the FTP, etc.

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

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a real cloud hosting packages provider will support numerous data center sites on different continents.

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

dns1.www.nextlevelwebhost.com

dns2.www.nextlevelwebhost.com

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

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud hosting service. This kind of DNS plainly shows that the web hosting platform 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 physical machine tackles all web hosting services (web, email, DNS, databases, FTP, hosting Control Panel(s), website files, etc.).

Remote File Storage - The Warped Definition of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting solution is not restricted exclusively to a remote data storage solution, as many hosting service providers wish it was. Unfortunately for them, if that was the case, most of the file hosting companies would have been categorized as cloud hosting ones a long time ago! They are not classified as such, as they simply deliver file web hosting services, not cloud web hosting services. The file web hosting platform looks indeed quite simple, in comparison with the hosting platform. The remote file storage platform is not a cloud hosting platform. It cannot be, because it's simply one small fragment of the entire cloud web hosting platform. There's a lot more to be encountered in the cloud web hosting platform: the CP cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the FTP cloud, the electronic mail cloud and... in the not too distant future, probably a number of brand new clouds we presently are not familiar with will turn up unexpectedly.