Cloud Web Hosting “Cloud” is the most famous word these days and specifically, “Cloud Hosting”; and it sounds a huge deal. Many consider it is a revolution in technology infrastructure as more and more companies are shifting to cloud-hosted environments. Among the reasons why cloud web hosting is increasingly becoming the trend, the enormous cutbacks in infrastructure overhead stand out as the most prevalent motivating factor. This, of course, is an off shoot of full server hardware redundancy, among other things, where companies substantially reduce expenditure on physical infrastructure. Another “come-on” of cloud hosting is its flexibility and capability to instantly scale technology resources. And this is because cloud hosting is compatible to current applications amazingly as well as being capable of faster time-to-market new applications. With this ongoing trends and statistics, business analysts predict that by 2012 cloud hosting would have captured 25% of all information technology spending.
what exactly is cloud hosting? Cloud hosting is conceived from the concept of virtualization, where a single server is segregated into several virtual servers. Each virtual server is allocated specific portions of the server’s processing capability, memory, and disk space. The concept is practical and simple. Your costs hinges on your actual usage and you don’t have to pay for server resources that you don’t use, as is mostly the case in other web hosting plans with underutilized servers. The fact that the resources are virtualized makes it easy to increase or decrease your allocations on the fly; which simply means you can scale up to a larger virtualized environment as your requirements grows or otherwise scale down if the demands are low. Pretty easy, isn’t it? Brilliant minds take this concept a step further in cloud hosting. Instead of partitioning one server, multiple servers are linked together into a (gigabit) speed network. To bind them together, a grid operating system is installed on each server. The amazing result: it provides you with a built-in redundancy and the ability to scale resources on demand. All the data you upload to a virtualized environment is mirrored in a ratio of 1:1 on every different physical server that is part of the cloud hosting network you’re under. That’s not all; the grid operating system is so set up that adequate spare resourced are reserved to hold out when one of the physical servers fails. When this occurs your data remains available, as other servers simply take the slack and the resources are restarted somewhere else in the cloud. You won’t even notice any difference because it all happens automatically and takes just about three to five minutes to get done.