Cloud Hosting Description

What is cloud hosting indeed? The term 'cloud' seems to be quite trendy in today's IT, Internet and web hosting lingo. Nonetheless, just a select few in fact know what cloud hosting is. Probably it is a smart idea to inform yourself about cloud hosting services. To make a quite lengthy tale short, we will first inform you about what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Offering a remote file storage service, which involves one single disk storage appliance for all clients, does not turn any given hosting service provider into an authentic cloud hosting provider.

The cPanel hosting firms call the ability to provide remote file storage services a cloud hosting solution. Until now there is nothing wrong with the cloud labeling, but... we are discussing hosting solutions, not remote disk storage solutions for individual or corporate needs. There's invariably one "but", isn't there? It's not sufficient to name a shared hosting solution, driven by a single-server web hosting platform, precisely like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" service. That's because the remaining pieces of the whole hosting platform must be operating in precisely the same manner - this does not relate only to the remote file storage. The rest of the services involved in the whole hosting process also must be remote, separated and "clouded". And that's really difficult. Very few web hosting vendors can really accomplish it.

2. It Involves Domains, E-mail Aliases, Databases, File Transfer Protocols, Web Hosting Control Panels, and so on.

Cloud hosting is not confined to a remote data storage only. We are discussing a hosting solution, serving countless domains, web sites, mail aliases, etc., aren't we?

To dub a hosting service a "cloud hosting" one calls for a lot more than distributing just remote file storage mounts (or maybe physical servers). The mail server(s) have to be dedicated only to the mail connected services. Executing nothing different than these given procedures. There might be just one single or possibly an entire set of email servers, determined by the overall server load generated. To have an authentic cloud hosting service, the remote database servers should be working as one, irrespective of their real quantity. Executing nothing different. The same is valid for the customers' web hosting Control Panels, the File Transfer Protocol, and so on.

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

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

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

dns1.www.limeserver.com

dns2.www.limeserver.com

If such a DNS is provided by your web hosting solutions provider, it's not a guarantee that there is a cloud hosting environment in use, but you can definitely be sure when you see a Domain Name Server like the one below:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud hosting platform. This type of Domain Name Server simply indicates that the hosting platform in use is one-server based. Possibly it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-server hosting platform and holds a market share of more than ninety eight percent. In cPanel's case, one physical server copes with all hosting services (web, electronic mail, DNS, databases, File Transfer Protocol, Control Panel(s), files, etc.).

Remote File Storage - The Warped Description of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting service is not restricted only to a remote file storage service, as a lot of web hosting vendors wish it was. Sadly for them, if that was the case, the majority of the file web hosting firms would have been referred to as cloud web hosting ones long ago! They are not classified as such, since they plainly supply file hosting services, not cloud hosting solutions. The file web hosting platform seems indeed quite simple, in comparison with the hosting platform. The remote file storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, as it's just one tiny component of the whole cloud web hosting platform. There's a lot more to be encountered in the cloud web hosting platform: the hosting Control Panel cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the Domain Name Server cloud, the File Transfer Protocol cloud, the mail cloud and... in the not too distant future, maybe several brand new clouds we currently are not aware of will surface unexpectedly.