What Actually is Cloud Website Hosting?

What is cloud website hosting really? The word 'cloud' seems to be very trendy in today's computing, Internet and web hosting phraseology. In spite of that, just a select few really can say what cloud hosting is. Probably it is a smart idea to inform yourself about cloud website hosting services. To make a quite long tale brief, we will firstly acquaint you with what cloud hosting is not.

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

1. Offering a remote disk storage solution, which involves one disk storage device for all clients, does not convert any specific hosting supplier into a real cloud website hosting plans provider.

The cPanel web hosting firms name the ability to furnish remote file storage services a cloud website hosting service. Up to now there is nothing bad about the cloud terminology, but... we are discussing hosting solutions, not remote disk storage services for private or business purposes. There's invariably one "but", isn't there? It's not sufficient to call a shared web hosting service, based on a single-server web hosting platform, precisely like cPanel, a "cloud website hosting" solution. That's because the remaining components of the whole hosting platform must be functioning in exactly the same manner - this does not relate solely to the remote disk storage. The rest of the services involved in the whole web hosting procedure also need to be remote, isolated and "clouded". And that's quite tough. A very scanty number of web hosting service providers can actually accomplish it.

2. It Encompasses Domain Names, Electronic Mails, Databases, File Transfer Protocols, Hosting Control Panels, etc.

Cloud website hosting is not restricted to a remote file storage solely. We are talking about a web hosting service, serving multiple domain names, web pages, e-mail addresses, and so on, right?

To name a web hosting service a "cloud website hosting" one needs a lot more than distributing merely remote disk storage mounts (or probably physical servers). The mail server(s) have to be devoted solely to the email related services. Doing nothing else than these specific tasks. There might be just one single or probably a whole stack of mail servers, based on the overall server load generated. To have a true cloud website hosting solution, the remote database servers should be working as one, irrespective of their actual quantity. Carrying out nothing else. The same goes for the users' web 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 vendor will support multiple data center sites on multiple continents.

Here's an illustration of a DNS of a true cloud website hosting plans provider:

dns1.hosting.intraden.com

dns2.hosting.intraden.com

If such a Domain Name Server is furnished by your hosting accounts provider, it's not a guarantee that there is a cloud web hosting environment in use, but you can definitely be sure when you see a Domain Name Server such as the one underneath:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud hosting service. This type of DNS merely manifests that the hosting platform in use is one-server based. Perchance it's cPanel. cPanel is a single-server web hosting solution and has a market share of more than ninety eight percent. In cPanel's case, one single server handles all hosting services (web, e-mail, DNS, databases, File Transfer Protocol, hosting CP(s), web site files, etc.).

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

So, a cloud website hosting service is not confined exclusively to a remote disk storage service, as lots of hosting distributors wish it was. Unfortunately for them, if that was the case, most of the file web hosting distributors would have been categorized as cloud web hosting ones a long time ago! They are not categorized as such, because they merely distribute file web hosting solutions, not cloud web hosting solutions. The file hosting platform seems really quite plain, in comparison with the hosting platform. The remote disk storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, since it's only one tiny fraction of the entire cloud web hosting platform. There's plenty more to be encountered in the cloud hosting platform: the web hosting CP cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the FTP cloud, the e-mail cloud and... in the upcoming future, possibly several new clouds we currently are not acquainted with will turn up out of nowhere.