Cloud architecture, cloud computing, and cloud hosting are the fast emerging, latest technologies. Very often, they’re referred to as the next tech trio, or the cloud trio. However, when it comes to the term “cloud” itself, you can easily get lost in the semantics. What’s the best way to describe this term? What’s the difference between cloud and grid computing? And, how are you supposed to define and explain cloud and shared hosting?

Cloud computing is often treated as an entirely new computer technology method. Cloud computing users consume the technology as services rather than as products.

If we accept this claim as a starting point, then we can construct the entire computer architecture on a premise that all apps, virtualized, software, and scalable resources, are provided as a service. In addition, we can take the cloud as a process that enables the merging of internet networks and physical computer resources.

Cloud hosting is often defined as the most popular type of hosting solution. These services are often provided on a pay-per-usage basis. As such, cloud hosting architecture can combine the best of both clustered and virtualized techniques. In addition, the web hosting provider ensures High Availability (HA) and fail-over clusters that can guarantee the quality of the web hosting services made accessible through the cloud. That’s why a clustered system represents an essential requirement of any cloud hosting solution.

In most cases, cloud hosting services are based on load-balanced clusters and the data is stored on SAN (Storage Area Network). This means that any of the cluster servers can be simply added or removed from the system when necessary. If some of the servers are down for maintenance or out of service, then other nodes can take the load instead.

Let’s sum up the benefits:

  • The users are charged based on the compute cycles usage;
  • There is an indicator to measure how much processing time has been used by the web hosting customers;
  • You pay only for the resources you use;
  • You can easily decrease or increase the available resources;
  • Thanks to web hosts, you can deploy new servers instantly;
  • You can ensure much better uptime compared with the web hosting services provided by the standard servers;
  • Cloud technology allows for the use of different technologies together as the parts of the same cloud;
  • You don’t have to buy or install new software or hardware every time;