Cloud Hosting is the delivery of web hosting services from a “cloud” of connected computer servers (Typically thousands of servers).
Effectively, cloud hosting is a web hosting model where the hosting is provided as a service on demand, rather than a pre-packaged product: a popular anology is that of the dlivery of electricity and other utilities. When you turn on an electric switch, the electricity flow and you are billed for what you use. If you have the elctricity connected but use very little that month, you are billed less. Likewise, if you ran a lot of appliances and used a lot of electricity you would pay more, but the supply would meet your demand. This is in contrast to normal web hosting models where the user buys space on a server (either shared hosting, reseller hosting, virtual private server (VPS) Hosting or a Dedicated Server) and they pay for their allocated “space” whether they use it or not. If their website becomes very popular and exceeds their allocated resources, it is very common that their site or server will “Crash” or slow down till it is unusable.
In contrast cloud hosting would scale to meet the demand, and the web site owner would simply pay for the increased resources used.
Cloud Hosting is a web hosting as a service, which will scale to meet your needs, so that the supply meets the demand, and you only pay for what you use.
Cloud Hosting has become possible following improvements in Cloud Computing technology, which allow massive clusters of servers to work together to provide a very large, fluid computing environment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
Q. What is Cloud Hosting?
A. You are probably already using it.
Chances are you already use a range of cloud hosted services. Online email, social media and social network sites rely on cloud hosting to serve data to millions of users at once at high speed and minimal downtime. Popular examples of cloud hosted services include Gmail, Flickr, Youtube , Amazon and Facebook.
What is cloud hosting and how can it help me?
Cloud hosting is most useful when a web site may have sudden bursts in popularity, requires consistent high speed and a very high standard of up-time. Whereas a typical shared web hosting account will choke if it gets many visitors at once (often only 10-15 at one time), a cloud hosting server distributes you web site deliver across many servers to ensure you have access to as much bandwidth, RAM, CPU power as you require.
Cloud hosting provides web hosting services at high speed, to meet any demand placed on it. When you no longer need extra resources, they are again available to the other users on the cloud, and your costs drop down to what you need
Cloud Hosting Providers – how to decide
There are hundreds of cloud hosting providers, each with a different set of features and resources. To the average web site owner (such as a small business or blogger) most cloud hosting providers are inaccessable because of the level of technical expertise and resources needed to set up and run the cloud hosting server. Effectively, most cloud hosting providers are selling raw computing power aimed at customers who need large, dynamic amounts of raw computing power.
What technical skills do I need to move my site to Cloud Hosting?
As a typical web site owner, you need a standard, easy to use control panel to manage your web sites and web hosting. Effectively, you don’t want to worry about the server: it should be invisible to you: it should just work!
We’ve examined the most popular Australian and International Cloud Hosting Providers and identified those which offer the most powerful yet accessable cloud hosting services suitable for the typical web site owner. Our standard yardstick for assessing the user-friendliness of a cloud host is the ability to quickly and easily set up and operate the popular blog/CMS platform wordpress. Read more about WordPress Cloud Hosting.
What is cloud hosting going to cost?
Cloud hosting typically costs several times as much as an equivalent shared hosting service, however once you factor in that you only need to pay for what you need, rather than paying for a larger block of web hosting to meet surges in traffic or future growth, cloud hosting starts making more sense financially. Cloud hosting really shines when high speed and uptime is required in the face of potentially large surges in traffic or other web site processing power demands.
Cloud Hosting allows your website to be delivered to many users at once.
