What is Cloud Hosting?

‘Cloud’ is the new buzz word in the world of business. Many businesses are moving towards cloud hosting and cloud hosting has become extremely popular in the past few years. The main concept behind cloud hosting is that the resources required for the infrastructure are spread across many servers probably across the world and are rendered on a per need basis. Cloud hosting comes with the benefits of reducing the downtime in case of hardware failures.

In cloud hosting, because the resources can be allocated on a per need basis, scalability becomes a huge advantage over dedicated systems. Also, this also means that load can be managed easily as load can be split on to other servers. Cloud hosting comes with the stress-free management without having to worry about the underlying hardware hosting your environment. Businesses have been moving towards cloud hosting to get rid of the overhead involved in management and maintenance of the dedicated environments. A typical example of cloud hosting is IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) offered by Amazon. Companies and businesses can have their environments hosted on the Amazon servers which are located all over the world. Amazon has been doing IaaS for a few years.

Each server in the cloud helps in carrying out a particular function. In case, one of the servers fail, it is temporarily taken out of the resources pool and another server kicks in to take over the functions of the failed server. Same is true if a site where these servers are located. If the site goes down because of a disaster, another site takes over the functions. The site recovery feature of course depends on the hosting provider and the money paid for the services.

This will also happen in case of an overload condition. The quality of hardware and the quality of service provided (meaning features like disaster recovery, zero downtime) depends on the hosting provider. In case of enterprise level cloud hosting, the hosting providers are generally utilizing high end hardware with Vmware which is considered to be the Rolls Royce version of virtualization and deliver extremely reliable cloud hosting services.

Cloud hosting has come a long way and has completely surpasses dedicated server environment and why not – you have multiple servers at your disposal whenever you need instead of a single server in a dedicated environment. In cloud hosting environment, because of the scalability and reliability, the businesses have the benefit of coping up with emergency situations as opposed to dedicated environments. The reduction in downtime and manageability are also some of the main reasons ahy businesses choose cloud hosting. With the cloud hosting services improving day by day, the cost of these services has come down in the last 4-5 years. Most businesses today want a hassle-free working environment where they can have peace of mind and focus on the business instead of dealing with the everyday dilemma of dedicated environments. The day is not far away when cloud hosting will be the choice of all businesses – big or small.