Description of Cloud Hosting

What is cloud hosting indeed? The term 'cloud' seems to be very trendy in today's information technology, Internet and hosting lingo. Nonetheless, only a few really can say what cloud hosting is. Maybe it is a clever idea to inform yourself about cloud hosting services. To render a quite lengthy story succinct, we will firstly let you know what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Delivering a remote disk storage service, which involves one single disk storage appliance for all customers, does not turn any particular web hosting company into an actual cloud hosting company.

The cPanel web hosting corporations name the ability to offer remote disk storage solutions a cloud hosting service. Up till now there is nothing bad about the cloud designation, but... we are talking about website hosting solutions, not remote disk storage solutions for private or business needs. There's always one "but", isn't there? It's not sufficient to call a shared hosting service, based on a single-server web hosting platform, just like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" solution. This is so because the remaining components of the entire hosting platform must be operating in exactly the same way - this does not refer only to the remote data storage. The rest of the services involved in the entire hosting procedure also must be remote, separated and "clouded". And that's extremely hard. A very scanty number of web hosting vendors can truly do it.

2. It Involves Domain Names, E-mail Aliases, Databases, File Transfer Protocols, Control Panels, etc.

Cloud hosting is not restricted to a remote disk storage exclusively. We are talking about a web hosting solution, serving countless domains, online portals, email accounts, etc., right?

To name a web hosting service a "cloud hosting" one requires a lot more than distributing simply remote data storage mounts (or possibly physical servers). The email server(s) must be dedicated only to the email connected services. Executing nothing different than these particular procedures. There might be only one or perchance an entire collection of email servers, determined by the overall load produced. To have an actual cloud hosting service, the remote database servers should be operating as one, irrespective of their real number. Doing nothing different. The same goes for the users' web hosting Control Panels, the FTP, and so on.

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

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a true cloud hosting plans provider will support multiple data center facility locations on different continents.

Here's an instance of a Domain Name Server of a true cloud hosting supplier:

dns1.ackenhost.com

dns2.ackenhost.com

If such a Domain Name Server is furnished by your hosting company, it's not a sure thing that there is a cloud hosting environment in use, but you can absolutely be certain when you perceive a Domain Name Server like the one beneath:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud hosting service. This kind of DNS only shows that the hosting platform in use is one-single-server based. Possibly it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-server web hosting solution and maintains a market share of more than 98%. In cPanel's case, one single server handles all hosting services (web, mail, DNS, databases, FTP, CP(s), files, and so on).

Remote File Storage - The Warped Definition of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting solution is not limited only to a remote disk storage service, as a lot of web hosting firms wish it was. Sadly for them, if that was the case, most of the file hosting firms would have been categorized as cloud hosting ones a long time ago! They are not referred to as such, since they merely provide file hosting solutions, not cloud web hosting services. The file hosting platform seems really quite plain, in comparison with the hosting platform. The remote disk storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, since it's simply one tiny component of the whole cloud hosting platform. There's plenty more to be found in the cloud web hosting platform: the Control Panel cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the Domain Name Server cloud, the FTP cloud, the electronic mail cloud and... in the near future, perchance a few brand new clouds we presently are not acquainted with will emerge out of nowhere.