Written by Jerry . Published on 9 Jan, 2009 . "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.
In fact, you’re already part of the cloud hosting/computing users (without being noticed) as Google naturally is a big promoter of this idea.
Google searches (as well as other Google operations) are operating under a massive computer infrastructure (cloud!) that people tap into from their local computers.
What is cloud hosting?
Generally, a cloud-hosted website is opearting on multiple connected servers. Instead of limited to a single server like what we have in traditional hosting services (dedicated/shared hosting), the website now has the access to multiple servers. Virtually, the processing power is unlimited as you can always add a new server and scale up.
Cloud Hosting in plain English
Here’s a video released to help people fully understand what Cloud Computing is all about and I think it’s a good piece of learning material.
Benefits of cloud hosting
Cloud hosting benefits the users from various angles. It’s 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.
Cost is another huge plus if you need a lot of processing power. Cloud hosting companies charge their users based on the quantity of computing power consumed. It’s like your electricity and water supply bills – it’s pay-per-use thus gone are the days where you need to reserve massive server powers to avoid website crash from sudden traffic surge.
Major disadvantage with cloud hosting: Security
Questions like these arise when it comes to cloud hosting:
- I am sharing the same physical hardware with other users, is my data safe?
- Where is my data located at? (You no longer control the physical location of your data in cloud hosting)
The security issue is always one of the major questions and arguments raised when it comes to cloud hosting. For those with similar concerns, further reading on this article (article dated Aug 31, 2009) is highly recommended: Cloud Security: Time to Smoke Another One? Also, check out this interview with George Reese (Author of “Cloud Application Architectures”) where he discusses cloud security and the challenges it poses for new adopters.
List of Cloud Hosting Services
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Cloud.bg Cloud.bg was officially launched on Jan 20, 2010. The cloud hosting provider is one of the first that supports cPanel/WHM on the cloud. |
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VPS Net VPS.NET launched their cloud hosting product in 2009. Scale your server up to 9GB of RAM. Full root access. cPanel compatible. 100 templates to install. |
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Cloud Computing ReliaCloud is part of a well established cloud computing company that delivers highly reliable, secure cloud hosting services. |
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SiteCloud is the first true load balanced cloud hosting provider offering cPanel/WHM hosting starting from $4.95 per month. |
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HPC Host is a VMware Hosting Provider offering secure and reliable Cloud solutions with operational uptime and the best customer experience as the highest priority. |
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Cloud Hosting Free trial at Atlantic.Net cloud hosting services. All the benefits of VPS, plus much more! Get servers in seconds and save today with Atlantic.net. |
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Cloud Hosting vServer Center is a cloud hosting industry leader offering enterprise class KVM, VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen Cloud Servers. |
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TurnKey Internet, Inc. is a leading provider of managed web hosting and IT solutions to businesses and individuals in over 30 countries. |
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NetDepot A new company based in Atlanta, Georgia; offers both dedicated and cloud hosting services at very competitive prices. |
Cloud Hosting: New Players, Pricing Examples, and More Updates
Updated on April 2010:Pricing Examples!
This post has been published for some times and the topic (cloud computing and hosting) was widely covered in main stream media for the past one year. It’s no surprise to see that the industry is crowded with more competitors these days. Beside the common big names like RakeSpace, Amazon, and GoGrid, we are now seeing FlexiScale, GridLayer, Cloud.bg, and NetDepot… and so on.
In fact cloud computing/hosting has grown from being a business concept to one of the fastest growing segments in the IT industry. From what I learned, many startup tech companies nowadays do not build their datacenters anymore, they simply go ‘cloud’.
In case you are unsure about how cloud hosting users are charged, here’s a quick example. Listed table below is the pricing data of NetDepot (in three different packages).
| Cloud Servers | Cloud Storage | Virtual Private Data Center |
|
Server grade hardware using Intel Nehalem chipset |
Cloud-based solution for data storing, sharing, and management |
Two or more cloud servers put together in a resource pool within vCenter |
| 500 GB Cloud Storage/1Virtual Machine | Instantly scalable and reliable file-level backup service | 100% Uptime Guarantee |
| VMware vSphere Platform | HP StorageWorks | - |
| $200/mo | $0.50 per GB/mo | $400/mo up |
Updated on July 2010: Affordable Cloud Hosting Services
It’s surprising to see how fast cloud-related hosting prices are falling recently. SiteCloud, a new hosting provider, was recently established and you can now get hosted on cloud at just $5.95/mo!
From outside, the SiteCloud’s hosting package looks just the same like any normal shared hosting services – unlimited storage, bandwidth, addon domain, email accounts… etc in a very affordable price. However, things are pretty different at the back: SiteCloud’s service is backed by Amazon’s Elastic Cloud SingleHop and all users are guaranteed with 1,000 compute cycles. To learn more, visit SiteCloud online – http://www.sitecloud.com or follow them on Twitter.
With cPanel/WHM getting into the picture and lower price tags, I expect to see more individual webmasters/bloggers going with cloud in near future. But will year 2010 finally marked as the year cloud hosting gone main stream? I can’t be 100% sure.
Updated on Oct 2010: SiteCloud Interview
There’s an awesome interview with SiteCloud CEO (Trey Gardner) done recently and I am sure some of you guys are interested to see how Trey answers questions like: “Why SiteCloud is not using Amazon EC2 anymore?” and “What happen next when a SiteCloud user exceed his/her CPU cycles”. Check it out: Interview with SiteCloud Founder, Trey Gardner.
Updates: Also, check out my latest SiteCloud Review – it should be pretty helpful for those who are looking for affordable cloud hosting services.
Side Note: How to get listed here?
* Cloud hosting providers: Please contact me at jerry@webhostingsecretrevealed.com if you wish to get listed here.
[...] * Ref: What is cloud hosting? [...]
I have a question – one of the big things about conventional hosting is connectivity. In many cases there is a single point of failure as there is only one access point to the host server.
Connectivity is probably as big a reason for websites not being available as problems on the servers themselves.
What effect does cloud hosting have on this risk?
@Nick:
From my understanding, yes, the connectivity risk does remained unsolved with Cloud hosting. Cloud hosting will still suffer certain level of down time due to network latencies or connectivity problems.
The benefit of having cloud hosting is the power to back your website with a highly scalable computer power (which in turn minimize the probability of crashing your server). The problem with network connectivity is not solved in this situation.
As I’m relative new to the technology, I tried search around to verify my understanding but couldn’t get any good explanation. I would appreciate the experienced folks lay their thoughts on the issue.
Hi, interesting article, i am looking for a cloud hosting solution for my site
http://www.Unstoppablehost.com is also a good provider for Cloud Hosting and Services based on Clouds. I think they are the best when is comes to support and scalability.
I just got the cloud hosting from unstoppablehost.com at it was quick start . I like them . thank you for you suggestions inderjeet singh. and jerry for the blog.
Then there are companies providing services on top of cloud hardware, esp. Amazon: RightScale, Engine Yard Solo/Flex and also including Heroku.
well cloud computing is not cheap nor its is easy i stick will old school way
I reall enjoyed the video. It was educational and light hearted and simple to understand. A lot of work went into it. Thanks!
You might want to add also Rackspace Cloud on the providers list
Nice article by the way
If they cloud is under DDOS attack, does that means all the websites in that cloud will get affected?
[...] were lots of hype in cloud hosting recently, will it be part of Eleven2 service in foreseeable [...]
Hello guys,
http://www.cloud.bg/en is good one
i`m from Bulgaria and I use this service…PERFECT price for unlimited resources.
And i thing cloud computing is the future – save a lot money and increase productivity
Thanks
[...] Understand Cloud Hosting – "Cloud Hosting" has been quite a buzz these days, but do you know what it means? [...]
One additional to add to your list is ReliaCloud (www.reliacloud.com). There similiar to other public cloud offerings but with a few extra features geared at the SMB market.
I just plain cpanel user, moving to cloud hosting (VPS) is bits upgrade for me. Thanks for this post, help me a lot.
is it usually refer to as Software as a service?
Cloud hosting can be IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service and they can also be PaaS – Platform as a Service.
Software as a Service is not directly related to cloud (but can be), since its just a way to present software to end users.
SaaS and Cloud is indeed the future of HSP and Telco’s. Cloud automation and virtualization solution surely need to be escalated to facilitate technology adoption and maximizing ROI.
I have noticed a lot of company’s offering cloud hosting. By cloud hosting they mean that they are taking one server with 16GB of Ram and allowing the client to scale up to 8 server with 2GB Ram each.
If you don’t do your research you may get stuck with a enterprise level server setup like a cloud located at 1 datacentre. Are the listed cloud providers above legitimate cloud providers?
[...] industry is obsessed of the words "Clouds", "Cloud computing" and "Cloud hosting". But very few discuss standards that companies use to provide Cloud hosting [...]
[...] competitive advantage presented by cloud hosting and platform as a service vendors to large scale national and international businesses has been [...]
Do you think with all the innovations in cloud hosting that security issues will begin to go away?
Cloud hosting security is a huge issue that has been a major concern to many people. I know hosting companies are doing everything they can to eliminate this problem.
This is the best article on cloud hosting I’ve ever read. Thanks for putting this together.
Thank you for your needed post. I also follow it
[...] terms "Cloud Hosting" and "IaaS" had been creating quite a buzz for the past few years. In case you are [...]
nice post. now i know what cloud computing is. very imformative
Thanks for the light hearted way you did you cloud hosting video! Maybe you’ll do a sequel to cover the other 2 areas you described in your video.
Regards.
These looks pretty interesting ..very nice post
[...] I believe SiteCloud is destined to hit great success. For those who are interested to try out cloud-based hosting, I suggest you grab an account at SiteCloud asap since the price is cheap ($5.95/mo) now. Users can [...]
Is anyone’s website hosted on a cloud? Can be have a look at it?
great idea. i haven’t ever heard anout this cloud hosting thing. this way every site will pay according to its usage. good.
Interesting Site, Will email to add our Cloud Servers to the mix also.
Thanks again!
Hi Friends,
I’m not familiar with these technologies. But I’ve I doubt. I heard before that, heavy hit websites like gmail or yahoo has servers all around the world. So their customers can access the resource easily. But one of my friend told me its, mirroring the servers in different locations. Then what is the difference between these cloud hosting and mirrored servers. I’m developing a website which will going to face highest rate of hit and data transfer. So I need a clear reply. So please reply… Thanks in advance..
Normal websites will never require cloud hosting; wordpress.com and blogspot.com users are already on the cloud since long. Only some websites in the Alexa top 1000 rank might need cloud hosting.
Well done. Great article, we will look into this option in the near future.
Really big sites, pretty much any site producing revenues of 10 million or more a year, will have their own dedicated environment hosted either inhouse or at a local data center near tehir office (or multiple data centers in multiple cities depending on just how big they are).
The system will usually based on VMware or similar technologies. They will have staff to deal with the data center staff directly, so they would never use such a service as above, which are targeted at smaller businesses. Whether or not a site uses a cloud, depends on your definition of a cloud, there are purist clouds, provisioning-only non-geographically diverse based clouds, and there are some purported clouds that should not even be referred to as a cloud, but like WEB 2.0 is thrown around as a buzz word. The word “cloud” is the new “web 2.0″.
In a purist definition of a cloud, a cloud is supposed to be provisioned geographically with route optimizations, that was supposed to be the original point of a cloud as well as auto-provisioning of CPU and storage resources. Amazon, Google, and some other companies meet this purist definition of a cloud, but most companies do not.
In its most simple and purist form, you’d expect at least 3 separate data centers on 3 separate networks as well as the ability to auto-provision across multiple servers on these geographically disparte networks especially in event of a major TIER 1 backbone failure. The topic discussed earlier about the connectivity issues not being solved is simply because these providers have altered the meaning of what a cloud really is because it is overly complex and expensive to have real-time geographial replicated data available at the closest data center route to your location. Google and some other companies are big enough to do this, and yes they do pretty much have servers in data centers all over the world, because they mise well since they have to run so many servers anyways.
Some hosting providers (not critizing the ones above or anyone specific) have started calling just about anything virtualized a cloud, some even do it when the “cloud” does not even have automatic provisioning. Most virtualization (Vmware, Xen, HyperV) have relatively simple implementations of automated provisioning (or is available in third party solutions). Some of these other companies (Google, Amazon, and others) actually had to do a significant amount of design work and probably some coding to get their cloud to be a purist cloud (for sure Google did). Many solutions are often just utilization of third-party software to build an auto-provisioning system from one network, with a backup network in another data center in case anything goes haywire. A true cloud is not a single network cluster of virtual servers in one data center, it must be located in multiple data centers, generally at least (3).
Even the non-purists type clouds are not necessarily a bad thing, excpet they are often far too expensive for what you get. In many cases, I would even say most cases, if your site does end up needing a bunch of extra resources instantaneously for any decent amount of time, then it would have been cheaper to use (2) load balanced high-end dedicated servers in the first place, because of the way some of these cloud providers implement their billing mechanisms (which can really bite you sometimes).
The problem with multiple data center provisioning is it can get extremely complicated and expensive with database latency replications occuring at the virtualized hardware level over geo-replicated connections.
This means with shared cloud hosting, at least one piece like the databases, generally needs to stay in a single data center (or else your looking at some even higher increasing costs) with only a backup standby that is truely in another data center.
This does not dimenish the fact that your site still has access to X resources and can use multiple servers at any given time with a cloud.
However, most sites do not need this yet, but some sites do. Eventually cloud hosting will mature and just about every major offering will be across multiple data centers and automatic geographical provisioning systems, and probably the costs will likely all changed back to fixed costs with just regular overages like shared hosting originally was designed. This in contrast to the CPU type cycle billing used now, which is often not a consumer-friendly billing method.
There are protection mechanisms in place at cloud providers that do not actually allow you to use unlimited resources (hence if your site got DOS attacked, you could owe 10 million dollars in CPU cycles), so instead they usually allow you to set your own limit or they have a limit set themselves, but usually it is a combination of both.
Regardless of what people call something, a cloud can be just about anything, you have to really look under the hood to make sure of what it is.
I do not recommend cloud hosting at this time for most people until the billing methods are more user-friendly and easier to understand.
It is hard enouhg for most people to keep track of how many minutes they used on a cell phone, imagine trying to keep track of how many CPU Cycles you used across multiple data centers and trying to re-code your site to be more efficient in worries you’re going to go over some CPU cycle limit. Even though their systems will tell you the # of CPU cycles, it doesn’t resolve random occurences that will happen to most sites of using excessive CPU at times, which is going to cost an arm and leg at some of these cloud providers. Hence it could be enough to ruin a small business man’s D&B rating or even a personal credit score.
Be cautious.
As a small web design company with a growing number of clients demanding quality hosting we recently moved all of our websites to a cloud hosting platform and we are very happy with the choice we made. Now, all of a sudden, our websites started to have fast response from the servers, which is good both for visitors and search engines.
We currently host at tsohost from uk, which I see you left out in your list.
This is very informative article. I would recommend this to those who does not understand what cloud Hosting is.
Cool round up. I just wanted to mention a company I’m currently working for – http://www.elastichosts.com their cloud hosting is pretty much based on the cloud server/VPS approach. Really flexible and cost effective especially for people who need to have multiple sites or testing environments…
I beleve Cloud Hosting can help admin about downtime.
[...] Understand Cloud Hosting – “Cloud Hosting” has been quite a buzz these days, but do you know what it means? [...]
[...] Understand Cloud Hosting – “Cloud Hosting” has been quite a buzz these days, but do you know what it means? [...]
I’d tend to agree with John on the topic. This is a technology for those who really understand the underlying concept, mechanism and most importantly the costing. One can easily tell you that this is by far an efficient solution to a web application with variable costing dependent on the level of usage, but to actually assess the resources required and consumed is something to be researched upon before going for cloud hosting.
For our web hosting needs (www.zoobeedu.com), we have adopted to make a gradual move from dedicated to cloud. As this is how we can analyze and understand our requirement trend first. I would like to suggest to people who are looking for an option for the first time to follow the approach.
[...] am collecting a list of cloud hosting providers at this page: A Brief On Cloud Hosting. It’s a piece of article written a few years back and it’s ranking very well in several [...]
Everything has pros and cons; same is the case for cloud hosting. But through this type of hosting we can be immune of bigger damages like total crash where a poor guy will lose everything he/she owns. Still it is new and we need to think about it.
My website is under development and is an online market space, how should I host it? It is the fate of 1000s of people!!!
[...] Cloud hosting offers nearly unlimited ability to handle high traffic or traffic spikes. [...]
I have been using Rackspace’s Could Sites for several years now. It is reliable and has saved by butt a bunch of times. I have watched as other peoples sites have failed when the traffic spike happens. There is really nothing to do when the server is gone. It is all about preparation. Done correctly, it doesn’t have to cost a bunch. My clients, mostly small businesses and non profits pay the same price they would from a discount hosting provider (about 10 bucks a month), but know that when the spike happens, their website will be online and no one will notice a thing. That is truly peace of mind.
[...] Yes, this is the new hot item for hosting….if you can afford it. There are many benefits to cloud hosting, and the one that comes to mind the quickest is redundancy. Think of cloud hosting as being similar in nature to a Content Delivery Network (CDN). With both, multiple servers are involved. The processing ability and speed are significantly better than other forms of hosting. This form of hosting, while ideal for anyone, is simply not an affordable solution for smaller businesses, bloggers, and the greater majority of those online. For more information and a quick video on cloud hosting, you may want to check out Web Hosting Secret Revealed. [...]
The article explained well about cloud hosting. Thank you. very useful.
There are new players in the market who offer the best of cloud hosting services. In order to get complete efficiency from the cloud hosting platform, it is essential to locate a good cloud host who will provide with the best of hosting features for ensuring the smooth functioning of the website.
Developers need to spend more time optimizing their code to run faster and cleaner, rather than just increasing the resources to their applications.
Great and informative article.Also the video is nice.
Hi,
great article, I am looking for a cloud hosting solution for my websites.
Carl
The cloud security is the biggest concern in industry. Most of the people think that in cloud, others have access to their data. It is completely wrong. As a fact, when using the cloud services, you are in isolated environment, so no one has access to your data but you. Your server is totally independent from any other clients. None other than you are able to access the information. Actually, a cloud hosting service offers more secure environment and complete transparency. Those who are not sure whether to go for a public or private cloud, they must consult with a sales executive of a cloud hosting provider.
Great article and video. Cloud hosting has saved us countless hours of work because we never have to worry about server issues.
Glad I found this article, been looking for some info on how cloud hosting really works and this enlightened my mind. Just one question, will it be okay to use cloud servers for some of my downloadable products? Will it be secure?