Cloud Hosting, Cloud Computing and Cloud Architecture are the latest and fast emerging technologies. There are many explanations to the term Cloud. Many get confused between the terms Grid Computing and Cloud Computing. Cloud Hosting systems are becoming more and more popular, because web hosts, basically Shared Hosting providers have to deal with a large amount of websites which require growing amount of resources.
One can find the best possible definition of Cloud Hosting in Wikipedia. I would like to take it as an entirely new and advanced method of computer technology. The major difference that I see is that, in Cloud computing, users purchase computer technologies as a service and not as a product.
The Cloud can be taken as an approach to build computer architectures and deliver services and applications to the customer with scalable, virtualized resources and software resources to be provided as a service. The Cloud can also be taken as a process of merging the physical computer resources with the Internet networks.
A Cloud Hosting can supposedly become the most popular type of a hosting solution. With this it would be possible to provide services on “Pay per Usage basis”. A Cloud Hosting architecture can be achieved by making use of the existing Virtualised and Clustered techniques. The Web Hosting provider must make use of the Fail Over Cluster or High Availability (HA) Cluster which can guarantee that the web hosting service made available through Cloud shall be redundant, multi-node that can offer dynamically scalable resources. A Clustered system is the most basic requirement of Cloud Hosting solution.
The Cloud Hosting services are usually based on load-balanced clusters, in which the data is stored on Storage Area Network (SAN). Any of the servers of the cluster can be easily added to or removed from the system when required. If any server is down for maintenance or for any other reason is out of service, other nodes are capable of taking the load.
Benefits
1. The consumers are billed for the use of compute cycles,
2. An indicator which measures how much processing time the web hosting customer’s applications use,
3. They pay only for the resources they use,
4. They can easily increase or decrease resources,
5. Web Hosts can get any new servers deployed instantly,
6. Ability to deliver better uptime than web hosting services delivered from standard servers,
7. With Cloud technology one can use different technologies together as part of the same cloud
8. One does not need to buy or install hardware or software each time.