Cloud Hosting for Dummies

Web sites have become remarkably easy to get up and running. Drag-and-drop web site building tools are widely available and often delivered as a free value-add by hosting companies; and once you’ve penned your pearls of wisdom and dropped them into a ready-made template, those hosting companies will give your web site a place to live for as little as a few dollars a month.

The traditional model of “shared hosting” is a robust one, and very usable for small traffic sites. Shared hosting simply places multiple web sites on a single server, ensuring that each web site owner’s content is secure and accessible only to those who have been authorized. Other common options are a “virtual private server”, which gives you more capacity and control; and a dedicated server. The latter option simply gives you control over the whole piece of hardware exclusively, and is usually used by companies with heavy traffic requirements.

A New Option

But there is another option. Cloud hosting gives you more capacity and power than a shared account, and is quite economical and incredibly scalable. In essence, cloud hosting doesn’t host your web presence on a single physical server; rather, it’s hosted in the “cloud” and may actually be drawing on the capacity and power of multiple physical servers. The immediate advantage of cloud hosting for growing companies is instant scalability—with a large cloud, you’re simply no longer limited by a single server’s processing power.

So Where’s my Web Site?

When you buy web hosting services from a traditional hosting company, your web site will usually live on a single server somewhere within the company’s data center. The term “cloud” naturally sounds ambiguous, and a common objection to cloud computing is based on misunderstanding. In fact, a cloud is just as well-defined as any data center. It is simply a group of servers that rely on virtualization technology. It’s true that your web site is no longer hosted on a single physical server, but in reality, location is irrelevant. When your site is hosted in a traditional shared hosting environment, you may know where the data center is, but you don’t know—and usually don’t care—whether your web site is hosted on server number 500 or 501, or on which floor it may be situated. Cloud hosting environments are usually contained within a private network, just like any other hosting environment.

Security and Privacy

Another common objection to cloud computing is one of security and privacy. Once again, there is a great deal of misunderstanding that arises from confusion between the “cloud” and the public Internet. A private cloud, which is used by a cloud hosting company, is not publicly visible any more than any other private data center. It is regulated by the same security protocols, your  files are not accessible by anybody else, and the network is still protected by firewalls and backed up with redundant infrastructures that promise high uptime.

Who Offers It?

Cloud hosting is actually not that revolutionary, and several companies already offer it. One of the best-known examples of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a highly reliable and highly rated service that gives you upwards and downwards scalability and complete control over your virtual environment. Other reputable providers, including Rackspace, also offer cloud hosting products, including products for on-demand computing power, web hosting, and file storage.

Cloud hosting isn’t for everybody, but it is for companies that want the greatest amount of flexibility possible without having to over-provision. If all you have is a small site with very little traffic, cloud hosting may be irrelevant; but for larger companies with growing needs, it can take the place of an on-premises data center—and save big money in the process.