What Exactly is Cloud Hosting?
What is cloud hosting in fact? The term 'cloud' appears to be very trendy in today's information technology, Internet and hosting lingo. Nonetheless, only a select few actually can tell what cloud hosting is. Perchance it is a smart idea to inform yourself about cloud hosting services. To make a quite lengthy tale short, we will firstly let you know what cloud hosting is not.
1. Cloud Hosting is Not Limited to a Remote File Storage Solely.
1. Furnishing a remote data storage service, which comprises one disk storage appliance for all clients, does not transform any specific hosting distributor into a genuine cloud hosting supplier.
The cPanel hosting vendors call the ability to furnish remote disk storage services a cloud hosting service. Up to now there is nothing wrong with the cloud terminology, but... we are talking about website hosting services, not remote file storage services for individual or business needs. There's constantly one "but", isn't there? It's not sufficient to dub a shared hosting service, based on a one-server hosting environment, exactly like cPanel, a "cloud hosting" solution. This is so because the other components of the whole web hosting platform must be working in precisely the same manner - this does not refer solely to the remote file storage. The other services involved in the entire hosting process also need to be remote, separated and "clouded". And that's really difficult. A very scanty number of web hosting service providers can actually make it.
2. It Entails Domain Names, E-mail Accounts, Databases, FTPs, Hosting Control Panels, etc.
Cloud hosting is not restricted to a remote disk storage solely. We are talking about a hosting solution, serving many domain names, online portals, emails, and so on, right?
To dub a hosting service a "cloud hosting" one requires a lot more than furnishing just remote disk storage mounts (or probably physical servers). The email server(s) must be dedicated just to the electronic mail connected services. Executing nothing different than these specific assignments. There might be only one or perhaps a whole cluster of e-mail servers, based on the overall server load produced. To have a genuine cloud hosting service, the remote database servers should be performing as one, irrespective of their actual quantity. Performing nothing different. The same goes for the clients' web hosting CPs, the File Transfer Protocol, etc.
3. There are Cloud Domain Name Servers (DNSs) as well.
The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a true cloud hosting corporation will support multiple datacenter sites on different continents.
Here's an example of a DNS of a genuine cloud hosting provider:
dns1.alobamdev.com
dns2.alobamdev.com
If such a Domain Name Server is supplied by your web hosting services provider, it's not a guarantee that there is a cloud web hosting platform in use, but you can definitely be sure when you observe a Domain Name Server like the one underneath:
dns658.hostgator.com
dns659.hostgator.com
that there isn't any cloud hosting service. This type of DNS just manifests that the web hosting environment in use is one-single-server based. Perchance it's cPanel. cPanel is a single-server hosting platform and maintains a market share of more than 98%. In cPanel's case, one single physical machine tackles all hosting services (web, mail, DNS, databases, FTP, web hosting CP(s), web files, and so on).
Remote File Storage - The Twisted Characterization of Cloud Hosting.
So, a cloud hosting service is not limited only to a remote data storage solution, as many web hosting vendors wish it was. Unfortunately for them, if that was the case, most of the file hosting distributors would have been referred to as cloud web hosting ones a long time ago! They are not classified as such, because they merely deliver file web hosting solutions, not cloud web hosting solutions. The file web hosting platform looks indeed very plain, when compared to the web hosting platform. The remote data storage platform is not a cloud web hosting platform. It cannot be, since it's merely one simple segment of the whole cloud hosting platform. There's plenty more to be discovered in the cloud 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 foreseeable future, probably several brand new clouds we presently don't know about will spring up out of the blue.
| Basic | Delux | Ultra | Entry |
| Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage | Unlimited storage |
| Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited bandwidth |
| 5 websites hosted | Unlimited websites hosted | Unlimited websites hosted | 1 website hosted |
| 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial | 30-Day Free Trial |
| $3.92 / month | $8.67 / month | $12.50 / month | $3.00 / month |