As of late, every big name in the hosting industry seems to be jumping on the new cloud technology and offering their own virtual cloud servers and hosting packages.
But is it really worth the hype? Is cloud hosting the next step in the evolution of hosting technology? Everyone tends to agree that it truly is. Cloud hosting allows the data centers to offer better, cheaper, more stable and reliable hosting for any variety of needs that also uses space more efficiently and consumes much less power than traditional dedicated servers and clusters.
Cloud hosting is like a mix between shared hosting, Virtual Private Servers and a few other technologies for better scalability. You could say it’s shared hosting 2.0, because instead of using one physical machine, it uses hundreds, thousands or even more inter-connected machines that run an even higher number of virtual hosting accounts and virtual dedicated servers.
For comparison, if in shared hosting or VPS, a single physical machine runs a few dozen client accounts, then in cloud hosting, a thousand physical machines run hundreds of thousands of hosting accounts, dynamically distributing the common resources between all the sites and applications hosted.
Cloud Hosting
Below are a few of the reasons why cloud hosting is better than any of the existing traditional hosting technologies like shared, VPS, dedicated or cluster servers.
Infinite Scalability
One of the best advantages of cloud hosting is the possibility to easily scale everything up. Thanks to everything being virtualized, you can add and remove hard drives, memory, power sources and even whole server without any of the sites and applications hosted experiencing downtime (they won’t notice anything even if they monitor everything very carefully). If the cloud is started to get overloaded, you can easily plugin those additional servers in and they’ll start working right away. You get more speed and resources and no downtime and problems.
Resource and Energy Efficiency
A normal dedicated server of which there are hundreds and thousands in every data center rarely uses more than 60% of its resources. Of course, there are clients that squeeze every last bit of performance out of their servers, but most people never optimize them. And that would be fine and all if not for one important detail: the servers consume almost the same amount of energy whether they’re fully loaded or idling. Sure, all of the new processors have power saving technologies, but the memory, hard drives, motherboard, controllers and other components never power down and always use energy. And data centers lose money on that.
This is a problem that shared hosting and VPS were pretty successful at solving. In these setups, the machines’ resources are always used to the maximum, because there are always sites and scripts that need them. They dynamically allocate memory, processor time, bandwidth and hard drive space to the clients that need them.
Cloud hosting takes it one step further, using thousands of physical machines to power hundreds of thousands virtual ones. This leads to less used space, less money spent on energy and more performance per server rack. Why have 10,000 machines running separately online when you can have 3,000 interconnected machines executing the same tasks with the same performance?
Infinite Performance
If you have the ability to scale everything up in a cloud hosting setup, you have the possibility to increase its performance to practically infinite levels. By using less machines with more cores, memory modules and hard drives (let’s say you get the best 12 core processors and 2.5 inch drives to save space), interconnected together, you get more performance and less energy use per square foot of space than you ever would with normal dedicated server clusters and you significantly delay the time when you’ll need to build or buy a new data center because the current one doesn’t have enough space for your equipment.
Increased Reliability
Cloud hosting is much more reliable than traditional technologies because everything is virtualized, so you can easily store any files in multiple copies, and have the work of faulty components seamlessly taken over by functioning ones. You can think of it as of a massive RAID array, only it’s for all the resources, not only the hard drives.
No dependence on hardware
With cloud hosting, you don’t have to depend on hardware. You don’t have to worry that you’ll run out of memory, processor power or hard disk space; because the cloud will automatically add more for you in mere seconds (assuming you got a plan that supports this feature). A cloud in a data center has access to thousands of processor core, Gigabytes of RAM and Terabytes of space. And it’s almost impossible for all of them to be used at once, so there’s always gonna be some left as a backup for those clients and sites that need it.
Cloud hosting is a much better and efficient technology than any of the existing ones. Everyone agrees that in the future, it will be the dominant hosting technology, because it works better for almost every task possible, so there is no reason to use, for example, dedicated servers or clusters.
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