What In Fact is Cloud Website Hosting?

What is cloud hosting actually? The term 'cloud' appears to be quite modish in today's IT, Internet and hosting lingo. Nevertheless, only a few actually are aware of what cloud hosting is. Perchance it is a clever idea to educate yourself about cloud hosting services. To make a quite lengthy story concise, we will first reveal to you what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Providing a remote disk storage service, which involves one disk storage device for all users, does not transform any particular web hosting firm into a real cloud hosting services provider.

The cPanel hosting corporations dub the ability to provide remote disk storage solutions a cloud hosting solution. Until now there is nothing bad about the cloud labeling, but... we are talking about hosting solutions, not remote data storage solutions for individual or corporate needs. There's invariably one "but", isn't there? It's not sufficient to name a shared hosting solution, driven by a one-single-server hosting platform, exactly like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" solution. This is so because the other parts of the whole hosting platform must be functioning in precisely the same manner - this does not relate only to the remote data storage. The other services entailed in the entire hosting procedure also must be remote, isolated and "clouded". And that's quite problematical. A very meager number of hosting suppliers can actually accomplish it.

2. It Entails Domains, Mailbox Aliases, Databases, File Transfer Protocols, Control Panels, and so on.

Cloud hosting is not limited to a remote disk storage solely. We are talking about a web hosting solution, serving a lot of domains, sites, mails, etc., are we not?

To name a web hosting service a "cloud hosting" one needs a lot more than supplying plainly remote disk storage mounts (or maybe servers). The electronic mail server(s) must be dedicated just to the e-mail related services. Performing nothing different than these particular tasks. There might be just one or possibly an entire bunch of e-mail servers, based on the total server load produced. To have an actual cloud hosting service, the remote database servers should be functioning as one, irrespective of their actual amount. Performing nothing different. The same goes for the users' Control Panels, the File Transfer Protocol, and so on.

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

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

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

dns1.supernovahost.net

dns2.supernovahost.net

If such a Domain Name Server is furnished by your web hosting company, it's not a guarantee that there is a cloud hosting platform in use, but you can definitely be sure when you observe a DNS such as the one below:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud web hosting platform. This sort of DNS simply manifests that the web hosting environment in use is one-single-server based. Perchance it's cPanel. cPanel is a single-server web hosting platform and maintains a market share of more than 98%. In cPanel's case, one physical machine handles all hosting services (web, electronic mail, DNS, databases, File Transfer Protocol, web hosting Control Panel(s), files, and so on).

Remote File Storage - The Warped Interpretation of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting solution is not confined only to a remote file storage solution, as a lot of web hosting distributors wish it was. Sadly for them, if that was the case, most of the file web hosting service providers would have been classified as cloud web hosting ones a long time back! They are not categorized as such, as they plainly provide file web hosting solutions, not cloud hosting services. The file hosting platform is indeed very plain, in comparison with the hosting platform. The remote disk storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, because it's only one simple fragment of the whole cloud web hosting platform. There's a lot more to be found in the cloud web hosting platform: the web hosting Control Panel cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the Domain Name Server cloud, the File Transfer Protocol cloud, the e-mail cloud and... in the not too distant future, perchance a couple of brand new clouds we presently are not familiar with will spring up unexpectedly.