What Is Cloud Hosting?

[DLow]

Cloud hosting is a relatively new format of web hosting that focuses on keeping your website up and allowing it to cope with peaks in usage easily. This is achieved by spreading the resources required for your website among many physical servers thus reducing the reliance on any single piece of computing hardware.

How does it work?
Many, many individual servers are teamed together to create a ‘cloud’. This has multiple benefits –it balances overall load between the servers, massively reduces the reliance on individual physical servers for service provision and provides flexibility to deploy resources as required.
Indiviual virtual machines can then be deployed into the cloud, each with their own resource allocations such as processor, memory and disk storage. Disk storage in enterprise clouds is provisioned on a single highly available SANs (Storage Area Networks).
Software is installed on each physical server called a ‘hypervisor’. This is usually a small piece of code that controls the virtual machines that will run on the physical hardware. The most common hypervisors used are VMware, Xen and Hyper-v.


How does it compare to other hosting types
Cloud hosting is a relatively new and evolving technology and as such some service providers have struggled with their deployments. In particular, the lower cost providers have implementations on low quality server hardware with local disk storage which doesn’t really deserve the ‘cloud’ moniker. The better quality cloud providers have deployed on enterprise class hardware typically using VMware and have been much more successful at achieving the gains that cloud hosting promises.
In comparison to dedicated servers cloud hosting is now delivering a much more reliable solution. The distributed architecture allows users to achieve a much higher level of resilience than is possible with an entry level dedicated server solution. It’s not until you have many servers with hardware load balancing that a dedicated server solution can begin to compete on this level.
Shared or VPS style hosting is still a lot more cost effective than cloud hosting for several reasons. Essentially a single server with local storage is divided into many individual virtual machines which the service provider can then deploy. The need for capital expenditure in this configuration is much reduced which benefits the end user if the high availability features of the cloud are not required.


Does cloud hosting have a future?
Larger organisations have been using cloud computing for many years now to reduce costs and increase reliability. As market adoption is becoming increasingly widespread among small to medium sized businesses, cloud hosting is gaining additional momentum. The benefits are clear but caution must be used when moving your hosting services to the cloud. There are many providers that simply have not invested in the infrastructure required to build a successful cloud which could prove a costly mistake to a business looking to host servers. As always the best advice is to thoroughly research your selected hosting partners and seek customer opinion as to their service.

DLow Reviewed by DLow on 17th Sep 2010. What Is Cloud Hosting? Cloud hosting is a relatively new format of web hosting that focuses on keeping your website up and allowing it to cope with peaks in usage easily. This is achieved by spreading the resources required for your website among many physical servers thus reducing the reliance on any single piece of computing hardware. How does it work? Many, many individual servers are teamed together to create a ‘cloud’. This has multiple benefits –it balances overall load between the servers, massively Rating: 5

[Exel]

CloudApp uses cloud hosting
PSDtuts also holds all their downloads on cloud hosting provided by amazon?

[DeLeTeD]

yea amazon has cloud hosting, and it is good. Havent seen any warez supported cloud hosting sites though.

[Xman]

cloud hosting is the future of hosting really in my opinion as like dlow said the load is spread among many servers and you also only pay for what you use. You also have to think you dont have to deal with the douchebags hogging resources with your standard vps.

[DLow]

Yup so all sites that i host will s00n be on a cloud as soon as i play with some stuff here at the house =] even though cPanel will not be supported.

[Jesse]

Liquidweb released kickass cloud hosting. Haven't seen it here in offshore hosting yet. Once it hits $1.99 reseller rates I'm sure we will see it a lot here

[Lock Down]

I don't know where you guys get cloud hosting is cheaper than a dedi. I manage 3 dedis that have scsi high speeds miirored and striped that are way cheaper than the cost of cloud hosting.
Here is the cost & layouts of most clouds:

CloudLayerTM Computing Download Datasheet

Massively scale your computing resources on-demand. CloudLayerTM Computing lets you deploy on-demand computing instances running enterprise-grade and open source operating systems in as few as five minutes.

Guaranteed to be based on a minimum of a 2.0GHz processor, the CloudLayer Computing Instances are available with your choice of operating system and includes a library of images to choose from.

Built on SoftLayer's automated data center services expertise and Citrix® XenServerTM, these instances can stand alone or be seamlessly integrated with the rest of your SoftLayer dedicated servers, virtual servers, automated services, and additional CloudLayer Services, to create a unified computing environment with unequaled efficiency and interoperability.


Public Cloud:
A multi-tenant environment that is designed for workloads that require rapid provisioning.

Private Cloud:
An environment dedicated to a single customer that leverages virtualization tools to deliver a secure computing platform.

Bare Metal Cloud:
Designed for workloads with high I/O and that do not require a virtualization layer.

CloudLayer Computing Price
Public CloudBase Unit Options Hourly Monthly
1 Core + 1GB RAM + 100GB SAN Storage $0.15 $99.00
2 Core + 2GB RAM + 100GB SAN Storage $0.25 $159.00
4 Core + 4GB RAM + 100GB SAN Storage $0.35 $199.00
8 Core + 8GB RAM + 100GB SAN Storage $0.50 $299.00


Private CloudBase Unit Options Hourly Monthly
1 Core + 1GB RAM + 100GB SAN Storage $0.30 $159.00
2 Core + 2GB RAM + 100GB SAN Storage $0.50 $199.00
4 Core + 4GB RAM + 100GB SAN Storage $0.75 $299.00
8 Core + 8GB RAM + 100GB SAN Storage $1.00 $399.00


Bare Metal CloudBase Unit Options Hourly Monthly
2 Core - 2GB Ram - 250GB HDD $0.50 $159.00
4 Core - 4GB Ram - 250GB HDD $0.75 $199.00
8 Core - 8GB Ram - 250GB HDD $1.00 $259.00
16 Core - 16GB Ram - 250GB HDD $1.25 $399.00

Max RAM Unit Options Hourly Monthly
2 Core - 8GB Ram - 250GB HDD $0.75 $259.00
4 Core - 16GB Ram - 250GB HDD $1.00 $299.00
8 Core - 32GB Ram - 250GB HDD $1.25 $599.00