What is CLOUD HOSTING ?

In fact, you’re already part of the cloud hosting/computing users (without being noticed) as Google naturally is a big promoter of this idea.

Google searches (as well as other Google operations) are operating under a massive computer infrastructure (cloud!) that people tap into from their local computers.

What is cloud hosting?

Generally, a cloud-hosted website is opearting on multiple connected servers. Instead of limited to a single server like what we have in traditional hosting services (dedicated/shared hosting), the website now has the access to multiple servers. Virtually, the processing power is unlimited as you can always add a new server and scale up.

Cloud Hosting in plain English

Here’s a video released to help people fully understand what Cloud Computing is all about and I think it’s a good piece of learning material.

Benefits of cloud hosting

Cloud hosting benefits the users from various angles. It’s scalability and cost efficient is the commonly known advantages.

As the technology is highly scalable (load balancing, hardware upgrades, etc), website expansion can be done with minimum limitations. Think about the hassle of migrating your website from a shared server to a dedicated server; think about server crash when your website experienced a sudden surge – all these problem can be avoided easily by switching to cloud hosting.

Cost is another huge plus if you need a lot of processing power. Cloud hosting companies charge their users based on the quantity of computing power consumed. It’s like your electricity and water supply bills – it’s pay-per-use thus gone are the days where you need to reserve massive server powers to avoid website crash from sudden traffic surge.

Major disadvantage with cloud hosting: Security

Questions like these arise when it comes to cloud hosting:

• I am sharing the same physical hardware with other users, is my data safe?
• Where is my data located at? (You no longer control the physical location of your data in cloud hosting)

The security issue is always one of the major questions and arguments raised when it comes to cloud hosting. For those with similar concerns, further reading on this article (article dated Aug 31, 2009) is highly recommended: Cloud Security: Time to Smoke Another One? Also, check out this interview with George Reese (Author of “Cloud Application Architectures”) where he discusses cloud security and the challenges it poses for new adopters.

List of Cloud Hosting Services

Softlayer Softlayer is very first among cloud hosting provider. They provide reliable cloud hosting with Windows & Linux Operating Systems.

	Cloud.bg Cloud.bg was officially launched on Jan 20, 2010. The cloud hosting provider is one of the very few that supports cPanel/WHM on the cloud.
	VPS Net VPS.NET launched their cloud hosting product in 2009. Scale your server up to 9GB of RAM. Full root access. cPanel compatible. 100 templates to install.
	Cloud Computing ReliaCloud is part of a well established cloud computing company that delivers highly reliable, secure cloud hosting services.
	RackSpace One of the pioneers in cloud technology. Also started Mosso.com in year 2005 and now both companies are well-known names in cloud hosting industry.
	NetDepot A new company based in Atlanta, Georgia; offers both dedicated and cloud hosting services at very competitive prices.

Cloud Hosting: New Players and Pricing Examples

Updated on April 2010

This post has been published for some times and the topic (cloud computing and hosting) was widely covered in main stream media for the past one year. It’s no surprise to see that the industry is crowded with more competitors these days. Beside the common big names like RakeSpace, Amazon, and GoGrid, we are now seeing FlexiScale, GridLayer, Cloud.bg, and NetDepot… and so on.

In fact cloud computing/hosting has grown from being a business concept to one of the fastest growing segments in the IT industry. From what I learned, many startup tech companies nowadays do not build their datacenters anymore, they simply go ‘cloud’.

In case you are unsure about how cloud hosting users are charged, here’s a quick example. Listed table below is the pricing data of NetDepot (in three different packages).