What Is Cloud Hosting?


by Cloud Hosting - Date: 2010-09-20 - Word Count: 407 Share This!

Cloud Hosting has been creating quite a buzz around these days. You might be hearing the phrase for the first time but the technology is not something new at this time of writing.

Cloud hosting is Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand, like the electricity grid. It is also called cloud computing.

Cloud hosting is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The name cloud hosting/computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams.

Benefits of Cloud Hosting:

Cloud hosting benefit users from different prospective. Its scalability and cost efficient is the commonly known advantages.

As the technology is highly scalable (load balancing, hardware upgrades, etc), website expansion can be done with minimum limitations. Think about the hassle of migrating your website from a shared server to a dedicated server; think about server crash when your website experienced a sudden surge - all these problem can be avoided easily by switching to cloud hosting.

Cloud hosting companies charge their users based on the quantity of computing power consumed. It's like your electricity and water supply bills - its pay-per-use thus gone are the days where you need to reserve massive server powers to avoid website crash from sudden traffic surge.

Characteristics of Cloud Hosting:

A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, usually by the minute or the hour; it is elastic -- a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access). Significant innovations in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as enhanced access to high-speed Internet and a weak economy, have accelerated concentration in cloud hosting.

Types of Cloud Hosting:

A cloud can be private or public. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people.

When a service provider uses public cloud resources to create their private cloud, the result is called a virtual private cloud. Private or public, the goal of cloud hosting is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services.

Related Tags: cloud hosting, cloud server, cloud computing hosting, cloud computing server

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