What Exactly is Cloud Hosting?

What is cloud hosting in fact? The term 'cloud' appears to be quite modish in today's IT, Internet and web hosting jargon. Even so, just a select few in fact are familiar with what cloud hosting is. Perchance it is a good idea to educate yourself about cloud hosting services. To render a quite lengthy story short, we will firstly describe to you what cloud hosting is not.

1. Cloud Hosting is Not Confined to a Remote Data Storage Solely.

1. Offering a remote data storage solution, which involves one single data storage appliance for all customers, does not turn any particular hosting distributor into a real cloud hosting supplier.

The cPanel hosting distributors name the ability to offer remote disk storage solutions a cloud hosting service. Up till now there is nothing bad about the cloud terminology, but... we are discussing web hosting solutions, not remote disk storage solutions for personal or business needs. There's invariably one "but", isn't there? It's not sufficient to call a shared hosting service, powered by a one-single-server hosting environment, precisely like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" solution. This is so because the remaining fractions of the entire web hosting platform must be operating in exactly the same way - this does not refer solely to the remote disk storage. The rest of the services entailed in the whole web hosting procedure also must be remote, isolated and "clouded". And that's extremely difficult. Very few web hosting vendors can really make it.

2. It Includes Domain Names, Email Mailbox Accounts, Databases, FTPs, CPs, and so on.

Cloud hosting is not restricted to a remote data storage only. We are discussing a web hosting service, serving plenty of domain names, online portals, email mailboxes, etc., right?

To name a web hosting service a "cloud hosting" one requires a lot more than providing merely remote disk storage mounts (or perhaps servers). The email server(s) need to be devoted solely to the e-mail connected services. Performing nothing different than these specific assignments. There might be just one single or perchance an entire assortment of electronic mail servers, determined by the overall server load generated. To have a genuine cloud hosting solution, the remote database servers should be functioning as one, regardless of their real number. Performing nothing else. The same goes for the customers' hosting CPs, the FTP, etc.

3. There are Cloud Domain Name Servers (DNSs) too.

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a real cloud hosting distributor will support numerous server farm sites on different continents.

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

dns1.jampackedhosting.net

dns2.jampackedhosting.net

If such a DNS is provided by your web hosting solutions provider, it's not a sure thing that there is a cloud hosting environment in use, but you can definitely be certain when you perceive a Domain Name Server like the one below:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud web hosting platform. This kind of Domain Name Server simply reveals that the hosting environment in use is one-server based. Possibly it's cPanel. cPanel is a one-single-server web hosting solution and maintains a market share of more than 98 percent. In cPanel's case, a single physical server is responsible for all hosting services (web, mail, DNS, databases, FTP, web hosting Control Panel(s), website files, etc.).

Remote File Storage - The Twisted Definition of Cloud Hosting.

So, a cloud hosting service is not confined only to a remote file storage service, as multiple web hosting vendors wish it was. Sadly for them, if that was the case, most of the file web hosting firms would have been referred to as cloud web hosting ones a long time ago! They are not categorized as such, as they merely provide file web hosting solutions, not cloud hosting services. The file hosting platform is really quite simple, in comparison with the hosting platform. The remote file storage platform is not a cloud hosting platform. It cannot be, because it's just one small constituent of the whole cloud web hosting platform. There's plenty more to be found in the cloud web hosting platform: the hosting Control Panel cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the Domain Name Server cloud, the FTP cloud, the mail cloud and... in the near future, perhaps a few new clouds we presently are not acquainted with will appear out of nowhere.