This article at inkopia.com asks that very question. In the article they take a look five key reasons people prefer cloud hosting.  Those five reasons are:

1. Reduced capital expenditure
2. Scalability
3. Uptime
4. Automation
5. Data recovery

To see a summary of why they believe these are the reason for choosing cloud hosting take a look at the  full article.

Former disc jockey Dave Macli discusses how cloud-based services are helping his music-based business over at rcpmag.com.

Macli, founder and chief executive of social networking and music file portal The DJ Booth, thought it was a good idea out of the gate as the perfect example of a Web 2.0 enterprise client.

“In order to be successful we have to be on the cutting edge of the music industry,” said Macli. “If an artist releases a song and we don’t have it up the next day, our users will let us know about it.”

It’s for this very reason that Macli says he needs to keep focused. His company chose to have its IT infrastructure hosted by Dallas-based The Planet. Macli’s firm is headquartered in New York. Such is the nature of leaving IT to someone else Macli says.

Macli’s relationship with The Planet is a prelude to how cloud computing services can and will be deployed in the future.

This article at zarjay.net takes a look at some of the cloud-based services that are available from three very well-known companies. These services are setting trends now that will be come the standard for cloud-based services in the not to distant future.

There are quite a few services available now, but the big three you should probably know about are Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Amazon started the whole trend and offers the most wide array of services. Google offers one specific service for cloud hosting (although you can arguably say that almost every Google product is a “cloud service”), and Microsoft is the one getting the least attention, but their strength in the business world may end up making their services the most widely used.

Read the rest of the article to learn more about  the services each company is providing.

Cloudhostingmag.com takes a look at ten great ways to speed up your site in a two part article that examines some great ways to increase how fast and efficient your site is for visitors.  Their ten ways are:

For an examination of each of these ways check out part 1 and part 2 of this article.

This article on thewhir.com takes a look at some ideas for the future of cloud hosting as presented by De Spiegeleer at WebhostingDay 2010.

In his presentation, “Cloud 2.0: a vision on the next generation of cloud products,” De Spiegeleer presented some very compelling ideas on how to improve the entire data center environment — starting from the physical layer. He explains that most IT effort in the cloud is focused around upper layers, but there is little attention paid to automation, preventing of disasters, remote control, monitoring, auditing, power optimization, and a host of other problems.

As found on wiredweb.com:

Rackspace, the world’s leader in the hosting and cloud computing industry has announced that it has been voted as the overall 30th best place to work in the UK and once again the highest ranking IT Services company, in the prestigious Sunday Times 100 Best Companies Awards.

Brian Thomson, EMEA Managing Director at Rackspace, had this to say:

“We are very proud of all the progress we have made in our business over the last year and what is truly pleasing is that as the company has grown our ‘Rackers’ continue to feel valued in their roles.”

Congratulations to Rackspace for winning this award!

This article on networkcomputing.com takes a look at some of the crucial elements of  security design as we move forward with cloud-based IT.  Specifically it takes a look at the concept of the “11 “commandments” established by The Jericho Forum regarding the security principles of cloud-based computing.

The 11 commandments, released in 2006, include, among other requirements, the need to use open, secure communications protocols; security mechanisms that are pervasive, simple, scalable and easy to manage; authentication, authorization and accountability must work outside an organization’s area of control, and required levels of trust.

The article provides a good overview and evaluation of the security concerns faced by cloud hosting and how they should be approached.

VPS.NET will soon be offering CloudLinuxOS as a standard operating system, the first Linux–based, commercially supported operating system optimized for shared hosting providers. Why add CloudLinuxOS? Ditlev Bredahl, CEO of UK2 Group which is the parent company to VPS.NET,  had this to say on the matter:

“VPS.NET customers want full control and flexibility from their cloud solutions, CloudLinux provides our clients another way to have full control over their hosted environments, adding new levels of server stability and performance which is so critical to our growing client base.”

For more on this, check out this article found on thewhir.com.

As Cloud Hosting becomes more common people are bound to have questions about how it works and what the benefits of the Cloud are.

This article on Technorati looks at a few of the frequently asked questions about Cloud Hosting, including questions such as: Does cloud hosting mean that there is less security? or What is the big deal about cloud hosting? My VPS provider offers all that.

See the answer to these questions and others by taking a look at the full article. Perhaps you’ll even find the answers to some  questions you’ve never thought to ask.

VPS.NET is offering a free upgrade on all new deployments to celebrate their first year of offering a next generation model of VPS cloud hosting.

“VPS.NET is deploying thousands of new virtual machines each month which is an amazing achievement in our first year and demonstrates the demand and power of a cloud hosting model for our customers,” said Ditlev Bredahl, chief executive officer, UK2 Group, the parent company of VPS.NET. “Our customers value the ability of our solution to grow with their needs without locking into a specific platform, unlike some of our competitors,” said Bredahl.

Check out this article at PR Newswire for more information about VPS.NET’s anniversary.