Cloud Hosting - Some Frequently Asked Questions
For the last decade, the web hosting industry has evolved slowly. With the arrival of cloud hosting though, the last couple of years have changed that.
Cloud hosting has been broadly defined as an on-demand, pay-as-you-go, high-availability service. This is a big paradigm shift from the earlier, order-to-provision, yearly contracted, configure-your-own-backups and buy-or-lease-your-servers kind of a service.
A cloud hosting provider uses a cluster of servers with redundant disks, memory & CPUs to create a 'cloud'. Over this cloud sits an application which allows users to 'carve' or use a piece of the cloud for themselves for a specific period of time.
In simple words, cloud hosting allows you to use a web server for an hour, pay for an hour and be done with it. Think of it as a service like the electricity in your home. Switch it on and off as required.
Amazon EC2, GoGrid, and CrackerHost are some of the many companies offering cloud hosting services.
Let us take a look at some Frequently Asked Questions around Cloud Hosting:
Is Google Apps cloud hosting?
Google Apps is certainly cloud computing. However it is more software as a service than a pure cloud hosting service.
What do you mean by on-demand?
On-demand hosting has the following features:
- The ability to log-in to your web hosting control panel, create a server with the specifications required and the server or computing resource is available to you, instantly.
- The ability to delete the server when you do not require it. More importantly, to stop getting billed for it when you remove it.
- The abiity to upgrade your server and add more computing resources and/or downgrade it to remove them on the fly. Billing is calculated on a pro-rata basis, only.
Does cloud hosting mean that there is less security?
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