What Precisely is Cloud Hosting?

What is cloud hosting really? The term 'cloud' appears to be quite modish in today's IT, Internet and hosting parlance. Nonetheless, just a few actually can tell what cloud hosting is. Perchance it is a smart idea to inform yourself about cloud hosting services. To render a very lengthy tale short, we will first inform you about what cloud hosting is not.

1. Cloud Hosting is Not Restricted to a Remote File Storage Only.

1. Supplying a remote file storage solution, which involves one single disk storage appliance for all customers, does not convert any given hosting company into a genuine cloud hosting packages provider.

The cPanel web hosting firms call the ability to provide remote data storage solutions a cloud hosting solution. Up until now there is nothing bad about the cloud terminology, but... we are discussing website hosting services, not remote file storage solutions for private or business purposes. There's constantly one "but", isn't there? It's not sufficient to name a shared web hosting solution, powered by a one-single-server hosting platform, precisely like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" solution. That's because the remaining constituents of the whole web hosting platform must be operating in precisely the same way - this does not relate only to the remote disk storage. The rest of the services entailed in the entire hosting procedure also need to be remote, isolated and "clouded". And that's really difficult. A very small number of hosting suppliers can truly do it.

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

Cloud hosting is not limited to a remote data storage solely. We are discussing a hosting solution, serving multiple domains, online portals, electronic mail addresses, and so on, right?

To dub a hosting service a "cloud hosting" one demands a lot more than offering simply remote file storage mounts (or probably physical servers). The e-mail server(s) must be devoted solely to the e-mail associated services. Doing nothing else than these given tasks. There might be only one or perchance a whole assortment of email servers, determined by the overall server load produced. To have a genuine cloud hosting service, the remote database servers should be operating as one, regardless of their real amount. Doing nothing else. The same goes for the customers' CPs, the File Transfer Protocol, and so on.

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

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of an actual cloud hosting services provider will support multiple datacenter locations on multiple continents.

Here's an example of a DNS of a true cloud hosting firm:

dns1.websitehandyman.co.uk

dns2.websitehandyman.co.uk

If such a Domain Name Server is provided by your web hosting services provider, it's not a sure thing that there is a cloud hosting environment in use, but you can definitely be sure when you see a Domain Name Server such as the one beneath:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud hosting platform. This sort of Domain Name Server simply illustrates that the web hosting environment in use is one-server based. Perhaps it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-single-server web hosting solution and maintains a 98+ percent market share. In cPanel's case, a single physical machine handles all web hosting services (web, email, DNS, databases, FTP, web hosting Control Panel(s), web files, etc.).

Remote File Storage - The Warped Explanation of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting service is not limited simply to a remote file storage service, as many web hosting corporations wish it was. Unluckily for them, if that was the case, most of the file web hosting firms would have been referred to as cloud hosting ones a long time ago! They are not classified as such, as they plainly offer file web hosting services, not cloud web hosting services. The file web hosting platform looks really quite simple, when compared to the hosting platform. The remote data storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, because it's only one small component of the entire cloud web hosting platform. There's a lot more to be discovered in the cloud web hosting platform: the hosting Control Panel cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the FTP cloud, the electronic mail cloud and... in the not too distant future, perhaps a few new clouds we presently are not familiar with will come up unexpectedly.