What In Fact is Cloud Website Hosting?

What is cloud hosting in fact? The term 'cloud' seems to be very fashionable in today's IT, World Wide Web and hosting lingo. Still, just a few really can tell what cloud hosting is. Maybe it is a smart idea to educate yourself about cloud hosting services. To render a quite lengthy story brief, we will firstly tell you what cloud hosting is not.

1. Cloud Hosting is Not Limited to a Remote Disk Storage Exclusively.

1. Furnishing a remote data storage solution, which comprises one single file storage tool for all customers, does not transform any given provider into an actual cloud hosting distributor.

The cPanel web hosting suppliers dub the ability to furnish remote disk storage solutions a cloud hosting service. Up until now there is nothing bad about the cloud terminology, but... we are talking about hosting solutions, not remote file storage services for private or business purposes. There's invariably one "but", isn't there? It's not sufficient to call a shared hosting solution, powered by a one-server hosting environment, exactly like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" service. This is so because the other components of the entire hosting platform must be operating in precisely the same way - this does not refer only to the remote data storage. The other services entailed in the entire web hosting process also need to be remote, isolated and "clouded". And that's quite tough. A very small number of web hosting distributors can truly do it.

2. It Entails Domains, Mail Aliases, Databases, FTPs, CPs, and so on.

Cloud hosting is not restricted to a remote file storage solely. We are talking about a web hosting solution, serving a lot of domains, online portals, mail aliases, etc., are we not?

To dub a hosting service a "cloud hosting" one calls for a lot more than delivering plainly remote disk storage mounts (or probably physical servers). The email server(s) need to be devoted just to the electronic mail connected services. Performing nothing different than these concrete tasks. There might be just one single or probably an entire set of mail servers, based on the total server load produced. To have an authentic cloud hosting solution, the remote database servers should be performing as one, regardless of their actual number. Executing nothing different. The same goes for the users' CPs, the File Transfer Protocol, and so on.

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

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a true cloud hosting plans provider will support multiple server farm locations on multiple continents.

Here's an illustration of a DNS of a real cloud hosting vendor:

dns1.hosting-zen.reseller-hosting-themes.com

dns2.hosting-zen.reseller-hosting-themes.com

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

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud web hosting service. This type of Domain Name Server only shows that the hosting platform in use is one-single-server based. Perchance it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-server hosting solution and has a market share of more than 98 percent. In cPanel's case, one single physical machine deals with all web hosting services (web, email, DNS, databases, File Transfer Protocol, web hosting CP(s), files, etc.).

Remote File Storage - The Warped Characterization of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting service is not restricted only to a remote data storage solution, as multiple service providers wish it was. Unfortunately for them, if that was the case, the majority of the file web hosting providers would have been referred to as cloud hosting ones a long time ago! They are not categorized as such, because they plainly supply file web hosting solutions, not cloud web hosting services. The file hosting platform appears really quite simple, when compared to the web hosting platform. The remote disk storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, as it's merely one tiny component of the entire cloud web hosting platform. There's plenty more to be encountered in the cloud web hosting platform: the hosting CP cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the File Transfer Protocol cloud, the mail cloud and... in the upcoming future, maybe a bunch of new clouds we currently are not familiar with will emerge out of nowhere.