Cloud Hosting Defined

What is cloud hosting really? The word 'cloud' seems to be very modern in today's computing, World Wide Web and hosting lingo. However, just a select few in fact know what cloud hosting is. Maybe it is a smart idea to educate yourself about cloud hosting services. To render a quite lengthy tale brief, we will firstly enlighten you on what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Supplying a remote disk storage service, which involves one data storage device for all customers, does not turn any given hosting supplier into a genuine cloud hosting firm.

The cPanel hosting corporations call the ability to offer remote data storage solutions a cloud hosting service. Up until now there is nothing wrong with the cloud terminology, but... we are discussing website hosting services, not remote disk storage services for personal or corporate needs. There's always one "but", isn't there? It's not sufficient to name a shared hosting service, based on a one-server hosting platform, exactly like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" service. That's because the other fractions of the entire hosting platform must be operating in exactly the same manner - this does not refer only to the remote disk storage. The rest of the services involved in the entire hosting process also need to be remote, isolated and "clouded". And that's very hard. A very scanty number of hosting service providers can truly do it.

2. It Involves Domain Names, Electronic Mails, Databases, FTPs, Hosting Control Panels, and so on.

Cloud hosting is not limited to a remote file storage only. We are discussing a web hosting solution, serving many domains, web sites, e-mailboxes, and so on, right?

To dub a web hosting service a "cloud hosting" one calls for a lot more than delivering plainly remote disk storage mounts (or maybe servers). The e-mail server(s) need to be devoted only to the email related services. Performing nothing else than these given procedures. There might be just one single or maybe an entire cluster of email servers, based on the total server load generated. To have an actual cloud hosting service, the remote database servers should be working as one, regardless of their real number. Carrying out nothing else. The same is valid for the users' hosting CPs, the File Transfer Protocol, and so on.

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

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a genuine cloud hosting supplier will support numerous datacenter facility locations on different continents.

Here's an example of a Domain Name Server of a genuine cloud hosting firm:

dns1.www.rahservers.eu

dns2.www.rahservers.eu

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

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud hosting service. This kind of Domain Name Server merely manifests that the hosting environment in use is one-single-server based. Possibly it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-server web hosting solution and maintains a market share of more than 98 percent. In cPanel's case, a single server takes care of all web hosting services (web, e-mail, DNS, databases, FTP, hosting Control Panel(s), files, etc.).

Remote File Storage - The Perverted Interpretation of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting service is not limited solely to a remote disk storage service, as lots of hosting providers wish it was. Unfortunately for them, if that was the case, most of the file service providers would have been classified as cloud web hosting ones a long time back! They are not categorized as such, since they merely furnish file hosting services, not cloud web hosting solutions. The file web hosting platform appears really quite plain, in comparison with the hosting platform. The remote file storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, since it's just one small fraction of the entire cloud hosting platform. There's plenty more to be found in the cloud web hosting platform: the hosting CP cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the Domain Name Server cloud, the File Transfer Protocol cloud, the email cloud and... in the not too distant future, probably a couple of new clouds we presently are not acquainted with will emerge unexpectedly.