What Precisely is Cloud Hosting?

What is cloud hosting really? The term 'cloud' appears to be quite fashionable in today's IT, World Wide Web and web hosting lingo. Even so, just a select few really can tell what cloud hosting is. Maybe it is a good idea to educate yourself about cloud hosting services. To render a quite lengthy story succinct, we will firstly reveal to you what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Supplying a remote disk storage service, which comprises one file storage appliance for all customers, does not convert any specific hosting company into a genuine cloud hosting plans provider.

The cPanel web hosting providers call the ability to deliver remote data storage services a cloud hosting service. Up until now there is nothing wrong with the cloud labeling, but... we are talking about web hosting services, not remote data storage solutions for personal or business needs. There's invariably one "but", isn't there? It's not enough to name a shared web hosting solution, based on a one-single-server hosting environment, just like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" solution. That's because the remaining constituents of the entire web hosting platform must be operating in exactly the same manner - this does not refer solely to the remote file storage. The rest of the services entailed in the whole web hosting procedure also must be remote, separated and "clouded". And that's very hard. A very meager number of hosting corporations can actually achieve it.

2. It Encompasses Domains, E-mails, Databases, File Transfer Protocols, Web Hosting Control Panels, and so on.

Cloud hosting is not confined to a remote disk storage exclusively. We are talking about a hosting solution, serving lots of domains, sites, electronic mail accounts, etc., right?

To dub a web hosting service a "cloud hosting" one needs a lot more than delivering plainly remote file storage mounts (or possibly physical servers). The e-mail server(s) must be dedicated just to the e-mail linked services. Carrying out nothing different than these concrete tasks. There might be only one single or perchance an entire bundle of electronic mail servers, based on the total server load produced. To have a genuine cloud hosting service, the remote database servers should be working as one, irrespective of their real quantity. Carrying out nothing else. The same is valid for the customers' hosting CPs, the FTP, and so on.

3. There are Cloud Domain Servers (DNSs) as well.

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a true cloud hosting packages provider will support numerous data center sites on different continents.

Here's an instance of a DNS of an actual cloud hosting distributor:

dns1.simmetrypcs.net

dns2.simmetrypcs.net

If such a Domain Name Server is supplied by your web hosting plans provider, it's not a guarantee that there is a cloud hosting platform in use, but you can absolutely be sure when you spot a DNS like the one below:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

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

Remote File Storage - The Twisted Description of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting service is not restricted simply to a remote file storage service, as plenty of hosting corporations wish it was. Sadly for them, if that was the case, most of the file web hosting distributors would have been categorized as cloud hosting ones long ago! They are not categorized as such, because they plainly provide file hosting solutions, not cloud hosting services. The file web hosting platform seems indeed very simple, when compared to the web hosting platform. The remote file storage platform is not a cloud hosting platform. It cannot be, because it's merely one simple constituent of the entire cloud hosting platform. There's a lot more to be discovered in the cloud hosting platform: the web hosting CP cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the FTP cloud, the e-mail cloud and... in the not too distant future, possibly several new clouds we currently are not informed about will surface out of the blue.