What Exactly is Cloud Website Hosting?

What is cloud hosting in fact? The word 'cloud' appears to be very trendy in today's IT, Internet and web hosting jargon. Nonetheless, only a select few actually know what cloud hosting is. Possibly it is a fine idea to educate yourself about cloud hosting services. To render a quite lengthy story short, we will firstly disclose to you what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Supplying a remote file storage service, which comprises one single disk storage tool for all users, does not turn any given provider into an actual cloud hosting packages provider.

The cPanel hosting suppliers call the ability to supply remote file storage services a cloud hosting service. Up till now there is nothing wrong with the cloud classification, but... we are discussing website hosting solutions, not remote file storage solutions for personal or business purposes. There's constantly one "but", isn't there? It's not enough to call a shared hosting service, based on a single-server web hosting platform, just like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" solution. This is so because the remaining components of the entire hosting platform must be operating in exactly the same way - this does not apply only to the remote file storage. The rest of the services entailed in the whole hosting process also have to be remote, isolated and "clouded". And that's very problematical. A very small number of hosting companies can truly make it.

2. It Encompasses Domain Names, E-mailbox Accounts, Databases, FTPs, Control Panels, etc.

Cloud hosting is not confined to a remote file storage only. We are talking about a hosting solution, serving many domain names, online portals, e-mail accounts, and so on, right?

To name a hosting service a "cloud hosting" one requires a lot more than supplying plainly remote file storage mounts (or possibly servers). The e-mail server(s) have to be devoted only to the e-mail connected services. Executing nothing else than these particular tasks. There might be just one or perhaps an entire bunch of mail servers, depending on the overall server load produced. To have an actual cloud hosting solution, the remote database servers should be functioning as one, irrespective of their actual quantity. Doing nothing else. The same is valid for the clients' Control Panels, 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 packages provider will support multiple server farm facility sites on different continents.

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

dns1.justaclickaway.us

dns2.justaclickaway.us

If such a Domain Name Server is offered by your web hosting packages provider, it's not a sure thing that there is a cloud hosting environment in use, but you can definitely be certain when you notice a DNS such as the one beneath:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud web hosting platform. This kind of DNS just shows that the web hosting environment in use is one-server based. Perhaps it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-server hosting platform and has a 98+ percent market share. In cPanel's case, one physical server tackles all hosting services (web, email, DNS, databases, FTP, hosting Control Panel(s), files, etc.).

Remote File Storage - The Perverted Interpretation of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting solution is not restricted solely to a remote disk storage solution, as plenty of hosting firms wish it was. Unluckily for them, if that was the case, the majority of the file web hosting suppliers would have been referred to as cloud web hosting ones long ago! They are not categorized as such, because they plainly deliver file hosting services, not cloud hosting solutions. The file hosting platform is really very plain, in comparison with the web hosting platform. The remote data storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, because it's simply one simple fraction of the whole cloud web hosting platform. There's a lot more to be found in the cloud hosting platform: the hosting CP cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the FTP cloud, the email cloud and... in the near future, probably several new clouds we currently are not aware of will appear out of nowhere.