Cloud Hosting Explained

What is cloud website hosting in reality? The term 'cloud' appears to be very modern in today's computing, Internet and hosting jargon. Still, only a select few in fact are familiar with what cloud hosting is. Probably it is a good idea to inform yourself about cloud website hosting services. To render a quite lengthy story succinct, we will firstly describe to you what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Providing a remote disk storage service, which involves one single file storage tool for all customers, does not transform any specific hosting supplier into an actual cloud website hosting company.

The cPanel hosting companies call the ability to distribute remote disk storage services a cloud website hosting service. So far there is nothing bad about the cloud classification, but... we are talking about web hosting services, not remote file storage solutions for individual or business needs. There's invariably one "but", isn't there? It's not sufficient to name a shared hosting service, based on a one-single-server hosting platform, precisely like cPanel, a "cloud website hosting" solution. This is so because the remaining components of the entire web hosting platform must be functioning in precisely the same manner - this does not refer only to the remote disk storage. The other services involved in the whole hosting procedure also need to be remote, isolated and "clouded". And that's really difficult. A very small number of web hosting providers can truly achieve it.

2. It Entails Domains, Electronic Mail Aliases, Databases, File Transfer Protocols, CPs, and so on.

Cloud website hosting is not confined to a remote file storage only. We are talking about a web hosting service, serving countless domains, web sites, mail addresses, etc., aren't we?

To name a web hosting service a "cloud website hosting" one requires a lot more than supplying plainly remote disk storage mounts (or perhaps physical servers). The electronic mail server(s) must be dedicated solely to the electronic mail related services. Performing nothing different than these concrete procedures. There might be only one or probably an entire stack of email servers, depending on the total load created. To have an authentic cloud website hosting service, the remote database servers should be working as one, regardless of their real number. Doing nothing else. The same goes for the users' web hosting CPs, the File Transfer Protocol, etc.

3. There are Cloud Domain Name Servers (DNSs) too.

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of an authentic cloud website hosting corporation will support numerous datacenter locations on different continents.

Here's an example of a DNS of an authentic cloud website hosting services provider:

dns1.craneinternetsolutions.com

dns2.craneinternetsolutions.com

If such a DNS is supplied by your web hosting services provider, it's not a guarantee that there is a cloud hosting environment in use, but you can definitely be certain when you discern a DNS like the one below:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud hosting service. This kind of DNS just displays that the hosting platform in use is one-single-server based. Probably it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-single-server web hosting platform and has a market share of more than 98%. In cPanel's case, a single server deals with all hosting services (web, electronic mail, DNS, databases, File Transfer Protocol, web hosting CP(s), web files, and so on).

Remote File Storage - The Distorted Definition of Cloud Website Hosting.

So, a cloud website hosting solution is not restricted simply to a remote disk storage service, as multiple web hosting service providers wish it was. Unluckily for them, if that was the case, most of the file hosting service providers would have been categorized as cloud web hosting ones long ago! They are not referred to as such, because they plainly supply file hosting solutions, not cloud hosting services. The file hosting platform looks indeed very plain, in comparison with the hosting platform. The remote disk storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, because it's just one tiny component of the whole cloud web hosting platform. There's plenty more to be discovered in the cloud hosting platform: the hosting Control Panel cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the FTP cloud, the email cloud and... in the upcoming future, perchance a few new clouds we currently are not aware of will turn up unexpectedly.