What Exactly is Cloud Website Hosting?

What is cloud hosting indeed? The word 'cloud' seems to be quite modern in today's information technology, World Wide Web and hosting phraseology. In spite of that, just a select few really are informed about what cloud hosting is. Probably it is a clever idea to inform yourself about cloud hosting services. To make a very lengthy tale brief, we will firstly disclose to you what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Providing a remote file storage solution, which comprises one single data storage tool for all users, does not transform any specific hosting corporation into a real cloud hosting plans provider.

The cPanel hosting companies name the ability to provide remote file storage solutions a cloud hosting solution. Up to now there is nothing bad about the cloud terminology, but... we are talking about hosting services, not remote disk storage solutions for personal or corporate needs. There's always one "but", isn't there? It's not enough to dub a shared hosting service, powered by a one-server web hosting environment, precisely like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" solution. This is so because the other pieces of the entire web hosting platform must be functioning in exactly the same manner - this does not apply only to the remote data storage. The remaining services entailed in the whole web hosting procedure also must be remote, isolated and "clouded". And that's quite hard. A very meager number of web hosting service providers can really make it.

2. It Involves Domains, Mail Aliases, Databases, File Transfer Protocols, Web Hosting Control Panels, and so on.

Cloud hosting is not limited to a remote disk storage only. We are talking about a web hosting service, serving many domain names, websites, e-mailboxes, and so on, aren't we?

To name a web hosting service a "cloud hosting" one demands a lot more than providing only remote disk storage mounts (or maybe servers). The email server(s) need to be dedicated only to the mail associated services. Executing nothing different than these concrete assignments. There might be just one single or possibly a whole collection of e-mail servers, depending on the total server load produced. To have an actual cloud hosting service, the remote database servers should be performing as one, regardless of their real amount. Performing nothing else. The same goes for the clients' CPs, the FTP, etc.

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

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of an authentic cloud hosting supplier will support multiple datacenter sites on multiple continents.

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

dns1.123getonline.com

dns2.123getonline.com

If such a DNS is supplied by your web hosting solutions provider, it's not a sure thing that there is a cloud hosting platform in use, but you can absolutely be convinced when you observe a DNS such as the one below:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud web hosting platform. This sort of Domain Name Server simply demonstrates that the hosting environment in use is one-single-server based. Probably it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-server hosting solution and holds a market share of more than 98 percent. In cPanel's case, a single physical machine is responsible for all web hosting services (web, email, DNS, databases, FTP, CP(s), files, and so on).

Remote File Storage - The Distorted Interpretation of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting service is not restricted simply to a remote file storage solution, as a lot of hosting distributors wish it was. Unfortunately for them, if that was the case, most of the file hosting corporations would have been categorized as cloud hosting ones long ago! They are not categorized as such, as they simply provide file hosting solutions, not cloud web hosting services. The file hosting platform appears really very simple, when compared to the hosting platform. The remote data storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, since it's only one tiny part of the whole cloud web hosting platform. There's plenty more to be discovered in the cloud web hosting platform: the web hosting CP cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the File Transfer Protocol cloud, the mail cloud and... in the not too distant future, possibly a few new clouds we currently don't know about will surface out of the blue.