What In Fact is Cloud Website Hosting?

What is cloud hosting really? The word 'cloud' seems to be quite modish in today's IT, Internet and hosting lingo. Nonetheless, just a select few in fact are familiar with what cloud hosting is. Probably it is a clever idea to inform yourself about cloud hosting services. To make a very lengthy story succinct, we will firstly reveal to you what cloud hosting is not.

1. Cloud Hosting is Not Confined to a Remote File Storage Exclusively.

1. Providing a remote file storage service, which comprises one data storage device for all clients, does not turn any given web hosting service provider into a real cloud hosting packages provider.

The cPanel hosting vendors call the ability to supply remote file storage services a cloud hosting solution. Until now there is nothing wrong with the cloud classification, but... we are talking about hosting solutions, not remote file storage services for personal or corporate purposes. There's always one "but", isn't there? It's not enough to dub a shared web hosting solution, driven by a one-single-server web hosting platform, precisely like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" service. That's because the remaining constituents of the whole hosting platform must be operating in exactly the same way - this does not apply solely to the remote file storage. The rest of the services entailed in the entire web hosting procedure also need to be remote, isolated and "clouded". And that's extremely difficult. A very meager number of hosting vendors can really attain it.

2. It Includes Domain Names, Email Mailbox Accounts, Databases, File Transfer Protocols, Web Hosting CPs, and so on.

Cloud hosting is not restricted to a remote disk storage solely. We are discussing a web hosting solution, serving plenty of domain names, web portals, email box accounts, and so on, aren't we?

To call a web hosting service a "cloud hosting" one calls for a lot more than furnishing plainly remote disk storage mounts (or maybe physical servers). The email server(s) have to be dedicated only to the electronic mail related services. Performing nothing different than these specific assignments. There might be just one or possibly an entire cluster of mail servers, determined by the overall load produced. To have a real cloud hosting service, the remote database servers should be performing as one, regardless of their real amount. Doing nothing different. The same goes for the users' hosting Control Panels, the File Transfer Protocol, and so on.

3. There are Cloud Domain Name Servers (DNSs) as well.

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of an authentic cloud hosting accounts provider will support numerous datacenter facility locations on multiple continents.

Here's an example of a Domain Name Server of a real cloud hosting company:

dns1.malanghost.net

dns2.malanghost.net

If such a DNS is offered by your hosting solutions provider, it's not a sure thing that there is a cloud hosting platform in use, but you can definitely be certain when you observe a Domain Name Server like the one underneath:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud hosting platform. This type of DNS just illustrates that the web hosting platform in use is one-single-server based. Probably it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-server hosting solution and holds a market share of more than 98%. In cPanel's case, one physical machine handles all hosting services (web, email, DNS, databases, File Transfer Protocol, web hosting CP(s), website files, etc.).

Remote File Storage - The Distorted Characterization of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting service is not confined only to a remote disk storage service, as many web hosting vendors wish it was. Unluckily for them, if that was the case, most of the file hosting companies would have been classified as cloud hosting ones a long time ago! They are not referred to as such, since they simply supply file web hosting services, not cloud web hosting solutions. The file hosting platform is indeed quite simple, in comparison with the hosting platform. The remote file storage platform is not a cloud hosting platform. It cannot be, since it's only one simple fraction of the entire cloud hosting platform. There's a lot more to be encountered in the cloud hosting platform: the web hosting CP cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the Domain Name Server cloud, the File Transfer Protocol cloud, the electronic mail cloud and... in the near future, perhaps several new clouds we presently are not aware of will surface out of nowhere.