What Actually is Cloud Hosting?

What is cloud website hosting in reality? The word 'cloud' seems to be very modish in today's information technology, World Wide Web and web hosting terminology. Nevertheless, just a few actually know what cloud hosting is. Perchance it is a fine idea to educate yourself about cloud website hosting services. To render a very lengthy tale short, we will firstly tell you what cloud hosting is not.

1. Cloud Website Hosting is Not Confined to a Remote Data Storage Only.

1. Providing a remote file storage service, which involves one single disk storage appliance for all clients, does not transform any particular hosting vendor into a real cloud website hosting provider.

The cPanel web hosting distributors call the ability to supply remote disk storage services a cloud website hosting solution. So far there is nothing bad about the cloud designation, but... we are discussing website hosting services, not remote file storage services for personal or corporate needs. There's constantly one "but", isn't there? It's not enough to call a shared hosting solution, based on a one-single-server web hosting environment, exactly like cPanel, a "cloud website hosting" service. This is so because the remaining constituents of the whole hosting platform must be operating in exactly the same manner - this does not refer solely to the remote disk storage. The other services entailed in the entire web hosting procedure also need to be remote, separated and "clouded". And that's really difficult. A very small number of hosting companies can truly do it.

2. It Includes Domain Names, Email Addresses, Databases, FTPs, Hosting CPs, and so on.

Cloud website hosting is not confined to a remote disk storage solely. We are discussing a hosting service, serving lots of domains, web pages, email mailboxes, and so on, are we not?

To call a hosting service a "cloud website hosting" one needs a lot more than offering only remote data storage mounts (or perchance physical servers). The electronic mail server(s) must be dedicated just to the email associated services. Carrying out nothing different than these concrete tasks. There might be just one or maybe a whole stack of email servers, based on the total server load created. To have a real cloud website hosting solution, the remote database servers should be operating as one, regardless of their actual number. Executing nothing else. The same goes for the customers' hosting Control Panels, the File Transfer Protocol, etc.

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

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a real cloud website hosting distributor will support numerous datacenter locations on different continents.

Here's an illustration of a DNS of an authentic cloud website hosting corporation:

dns1.isolutions-ng.com

dns2.isolutions-ng.com

If such a DNS is provided by your hosting services provider, it's not a guarantee that there is a cloud hosting environment in use, but you can absolutely be certain when you notice a DNS like the one underneath:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud web hosting service. This sort of DNS just displays that the web hosting platform in use is one-single-server based. Probably it's cPanel. cPanel is a single-server web hosting solution and has a 98+ percent market share. In cPanel's case, one single physical server deals with all hosting services (web, e-mail, DNS, databases, FTP, web hosting Control Panel(s), web files, and so on).

Remote File Storage - The Warped Explanation of Cloud Website Hosting.

So, a cloud website hosting solution is not restricted only to a remote file storage solution, as lots of hosting providers wish it was. Unfortunately for them, if that was the case, the majority of the file web hosting firms would have been classified as cloud hosting ones a long time back! They are not referred to as such, since they merely offer file web hosting solutions, not cloud web hosting services. The file hosting platform looks really quite simple, when compared to the web hosting platform. The remote disk storage platform is not a cloud hosting platform. It cannot be, because it's only one simple part of the entire cloud hosting platform. There's a lot more to be discovered in the cloud hosting platform: the Control Panel cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the File Transfer Protocol cloud, the electronic mail cloud and... in the foreseeable future, possibly a couple of brand new clouds we presently are not aware of will appear unexpectedly.