What is Cloud Hosting?

What is cloud website hosting in reality? The term 'cloud' seems to be very trendy in today's computing, World Wide Web and hosting lingo. Nevertheless, only a few actually are familiar with what cloud hosting is. Maybe it is a clever idea to educate yourself about cloud website hosting services. To make a quite lengthy story succinct, we will firstly notify you about what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Offering a remote data storage solution, which comprises one disk storage tool for all users, does not transform any particular web hosting company into a genuine cloud website hosting company.

The cPanel hosting firms name the ability to deliver remote disk storage solutions a cloud website hosting service. Up until now there is nothing wrong with the cloud classification, but... we are discussing web hosting services, not remote file storage solutions for private or business needs. There's invariably one "but", isn't there? It's not sufficient to name a shared web hosting solution, based on a one-server hosting environment, precisely like cPanel, a "cloud website hosting" solution. That's because the other constituents of the whole web hosting platform must be operating in exactly the same way - this does not relate solely to the remote data storage. The rest of the services entailed in the entire web hosting process also have to be remote, separated and "clouded". And that's extremely difficult. A very small number of web hosting service providers can truly accomplish it.

2. It Includes Domain Names, Electronic Mail Accounts, Databases, FTPs, Hosting Control Panels, etc.

Cloud website hosting is not restricted to a remote data storage exclusively. We are talking about a hosting service, serving multiple domain names, web sites, mailboxes, etc., are we not?

To name a web hosting service a "cloud website hosting" one requires a lot more than delivering solely remote file storage mounts (or perchance servers). The e-mail server(s) have to be dedicated exclusively to the mail associated services. Executing nothing different than these particular assignments. There might be only one single or perhaps a whole array of electronic mail servers, based on the total server load created. To have an actual cloud website hosting service, the remote database servers should be working as one, irrespective of their actual quantity. Carrying out nothing different. The same goes for the customers' Control Panels, the File Transfer Protocol, and so on.

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

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a true cloud website hosting supplier will support numerous data center sites on multiple continents.

Here's an illustration of a Domain Name Server of an authentic cloud website hosting packages provider:

dns1.nortonhost.com

dns2.nortonhost.com

If such a Domain Name Server is offered by your web hosting plans provider, it's not a guarantee that there is a cloud hosting platform in use, but you can definitely be convinced when you perceive a Domain Name Server like the one below:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud web hosting service. This sort of Domain Name Server merely exhibits that the hosting environment in use is one-single-server based. Maybe it's cPanel. cPanel is a single-server hosting platform and holds a market share of more than 98 percent. In cPanel's case, a single server handles all hosting services (web, email, DNS, databases, FTP, hosting CP(s), files, and so on).

Remote File Storage - The Distorted Interpretation of Cloud Website Hosting.

So, a cloud website hosting service is not confined only to a remote disk storage service, as a lot of web hosting vendors wish it was. Unfortunately for them, if that was the case, most of the file hosting corporations would have been categorized as cloud web hosting ones a long time ago! They are not referred to as such, because they merely furnish file web hosting solutions, not cloud web hosting solutions. The file hosting platform looks really very plain, in comparison with the web hosting platform. The remote data storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, since it's simply one small part of the whole cloud web hosting platform. There's a lot more to be encountered in the cloud hosting platform: the hosting Control Panel cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the Domain Name Server cloud, the File Transfer Protocol cloud, the mail cloud and... in the not too distant future, probably a couple of new clouds we currently are not informed about will appear out of the blue.