What is Cloud Hosting?

What is cloud hosting really? The term 'cloud' appears to be very modern in today's computing, Internet and web hosting phraseology. Nonetheless, just a few actually are informed about what cloud hosting is. Probably it is a smart idea to educate yourself about cloud hosting services. To make a quite lengthy story brief, we will firstly acquaint you with what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Supplying a remote file storage solution, which involves one disk storage device for all customers, does not convert any specific provider into a real cloud hosting company.

The cPanel hosting distributors dub the ability to furnish remote file storage services a cloud hosting solution. Until now there is nothing bad about the cloud labeling, but... we are talking about hosting services, not remote disk storage solutions for private or corporate purposes. There's always one "but", isn't there? It's not enough to dub a shared hosting solution, based on a one-server web hosting platform, just like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" service. That's because the other pieces of the entire hosting platform must be functioning in exactly the same way - this does not relate only to the remote data storage. The remaining services involved in the entire hosting procedure also need to be remote, separated and "clouded". And that's quite difficult. A very meager number of hosting suppliers can really do it.

2. It Involves Domains, Email Box Accounts, Databases, FTPs, Web Hosting Control Panels, and so on.

Cloud hosting is not limited to a remote data storage only. We are talking about a hosting solution, serving a lot of domains, online portals, mail aliases, etc., right?

To dub a web hosting service a "cloud hosting" one demands a lot more than providing plainly remote data storage mounts (or perchance servers). The mail server(s) need to be devoted just to the electronic mail related services. Executing nothing else than these given procedures. There might be just one or perchance an entire set of mail servers, depending on the total load produced. To have an actual cloud hosting service, the remote database servers should be working as one, regardless of their real number. Doing nothing else. The same is valid for the users' hosting CPs, the FTP, etc.

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

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a real cloud hosting corporation will support multiple data center locations on different continents.

Here's an illustration of a DNS of a real cloud hosting provider:

dns1.ceruliangrouphost.com

dns2.ceruliangrouphost.com

If such a DNS is furnished by your web hosting plans provider, it's not a sure thing that there is a cloud hosting platform in use, but you can absolutely be certain when you perceive a Domain Name Server such as the one underneath:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud web hosting platform. This type of Domain Name Server plainly demonstrates that the web hosting environment in use is one-server based. Possibly it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-server web hosting solution and has a market share of more than 98 percent. In cPanel's case, one single physical server is responsible for all web hosting services (web, e-mail, DNS, databases, FTP, web hosting Control Panel(s), files, etc.).

Remote File Storage - The Warped Description of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting service is not limited simply to a remote file storage service, as lots of web hosting vendors wish it was. Unluckily for them, if that was the case, the majority of the file hosting providers would have been referred to as cloud hosting ones a long time back! They are not classified as such, as they simply furnish file hosting services, not cloud web hosting services. The file web hosting platform looks really quite simple, in comparison with the hosting platform. The remote data storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, because it's simply one tiny fraction of the entire cloud hosting platform. There's a lot more to be found in the cloud web hosting platform: the web hosting CP cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the Domain Name Server cloud, the FTP cloud, the electronic mail cloud and... in the near future, maybe a number of brand new clouds we presently are not informed about will turn up out of nowhere.