How Does Cloud Website Hosting Function?

What is cloud website hosting in fact? The term 'cloud' appears to be quite fashionable in today's IT, Internet and web hosting parlance. Still, just a few in fact can say what cloud hosting is. Maybe it is a fine idea to educate yourself about cloud website hosting services. To make a quite long tale concise, we will firstly let you know what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Providing a remote disk storage service, which involves one single disk storage appliance for all clients, does not convert any given hosting supplier into a real cloud website hosting vendor.

The cPanel hosting firms name the ability to furnish remote disk storage services a cloud website hosting solution. Up to now there is nothing wrong with the cloud terminology, but... we are talking about hosting solutions, not remote disk storage solutions for private or business needs. There's always one "but", isn't there? It's not sufficient to call a shared hosting service, driven by a one-server hosting environment, precisely like cPanel, a "cloud website hosting" service. That's because the other components of the entire web hosting platform must be operating in precisely the same manner - this does not apply only to the remote disk storage. The rest of the services involved in the entire hosting process also must be remote, isolated and "clouded". And that's quite hard. A very meager number of service providers can really accomplish it.

2. It Includes Domain Names, E-mail Aliases, Databases, FTPs, Web Hosting Control Panels, and so on.

Cloud website hosting is not limited to a remote disk storage only. We are talking about a web hosting service, serving many domain names, sites, mail accounts, etc., are we not?

To call a web hosting service a "cloud website hosting" one calls for a lot more than delivering plainly remote file storage mounts (or probably physical servers). The mail server(s) need to be dedicated solely to the mail related services. Doing nothing else than these specific tasks. There might be only one or probably a whole stack of mail servers, determined by the overall server load created. To have a true cloud website hosting service, the remote database servers should be operating as one, irrespective of their actual quantity. Carrying out nothing different. The same is valid for the clients' hosting CPs, the FTP, etc.

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

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a genuine cloud website hosting packages provider will support multiple datacenter facility locations on multiple continents.

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

dns1.myinternethost.com

dns2.myinternethost.com

If such a DNS is provided by your web hosting vendor, it's not a guarantee that there is a cloud hosting environment in use, but you can absolutely be convinced when you observe a Domain Name Server like the one below:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud web hosting platform. This type of Domain Name Server just indicates that the web hosting environment in use is one-server based. Maybe it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-single-server hosting solution and has a market share of more than ninety eight percent. In cPanel's case, one single physical server tackles all hosting services (web, mail, DNS, databases, File Transfer Protocol, hosting Control Panel(s), web site files, etc.).

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

So, a cloud website hosting service is not confined just to a remote data storage service, as many hosting distributors wish it was. Unfortunately for them, if that was the case, the majority of the file web hosting providers would have been categorized as cloud web hosting ones a long time ago! They are not classified as such, as they merely distribute file web hosting solutions, not cloud hosting services. The file web hosting platform looks really quite simple, when compared to the hosting platform. The remote file storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, because it's just one tiny part of the entire cloud web hosting platform. There's plenty more to be found in the cloud hosting platform: the web hosting Control Panel cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the FTP cloud, the email cloud and... in the not too distant future, possibly a couple of brand new clouds we currently are not informed about will turn up unexpectedly.