What Is Cloud Hosting?

It seems like everyone is talking about the wonder of cloud hosting. So what is it?

Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting is a type of web hosting that enables your website to scale without replacing or upgrading hardware. It lets you focus on making your website great, instead of  how to keep it running.

This can happen because of “the cloud” — multiple servers linked together to form one platform. Because there are many servers instead of one, it balances the load, increases capacity, and eliminates a single point of failure.

That is, if a server’s hard drive fails, your site is unaffected, because your data is mirrored on other servers.

Shared vs. Cloud Hosting

Until recently, most hosting was shared hosting. You can think of it as sucky hosting.

It sucks because shared hosting is hundreds or thousands of sites on a single computer. You see where this is going, don’t you? If that computer’s motherboard fails, all the sites go down. If one site gets a burst in traffic, all the sites go down.

See, I told you it sucked.

Thankfully, some geniuses got together, drank a lot of Mountain Dew, and — in the middle of an intense game of Halo — discovered cloud hosting. At least that’s how I envision it. That may or may not be what really happened.

Cloud hosting solves the problems of shared hosting. First, since the load is spread over multiple computers, sites are far more unlikely to crash because of a traffic spike. Secondly, if a server fails, the websites still function, because there isn’t a single point of failure.

Unfortunatley it doesn’t always work out that way in reality. Cloud hosting is an evolving technology, and cloud hosting sites can go down. The infrastructure behind cloud hosting is a lot more complex than shared hosting, which means more things can go wrong if the host tech’s are not competent (or even if a competent tech makes a mistake).

The benefits outweigh the disadvantages though, and everyone knows the future of hosting is cloud hosting. All popular websites use a type of cloud hosting, and the service is spreading to smaller sites as well.

Which Cloud Hosting Provider Is Best?

We think the best cloud hosting company is VPS.NET. They are inexpensive, reliable, easy to scale, and support is responsive and helpful. We have used them for many projects and highly recommend them.

Rackspace Cloudsites and Cloudservers is another popular option. Unfortunately, Rackspace does not have the same reputation in cloud hosting as they do in dedicated server hosting. They are also expensive.

Amazon EC2 is a good option for developers or people with a lot of tech experience. It is a very stable platform and proven to be reliable. The main disadvantage is the complexity of setup. We only recommend EC2 for geeks (and we mean “geeks” as a compliment, of course!).

As cloud hosting evolves, so will the industry. Be sure to check out CloudHostingHQ for the most recent recommendations.