"The Cloud" Part 2 - Cloud hosting

Yesterday I discussed the idea of having too much faith in “The Cloud”, I covered this by looking at cloud services such as Flickr and YouTube. However I did not touch on hosting your web site on a cloud service.

Many web hosting companies are now offering some sort of cloud hosting service, the problem is, because the term cloud is so wooly these cloud hosting services differ greatly.

If you remember from my last post, I quoted Wikipedia’s definition of cloud computing as “Cloud computing is a way of computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC.” Using this definition, cloud hosting could be as little as spreading the web site over multiple servers, and this has been done for years.

So, is cloud computing just a marketing ploy?
Maybe, as I have said previously, cloud computing is very much a buzz word at the moment, and by using this buzz word I expect hosting companies do get a lot of business. Following the cloud computing definition of spreading a web site over multiple servers, this has always been quite an expensive and complex system to setup. With the cloud computing boom and many hosting companies offering these services the workload and price has dropped a lot. Many users would look at cloud hosting and think about scalability, I don’t think cloud hosting means scalability, but this is often a by product.

My experience of cloud hosting
This website is hosted with vps.net, their service is marketed at “VPS cloud hosting”. VPS means that you get a virtual server all to yourself, cloud hosting is then the wooly area. My VPS from VPS.net has 1.8GHz CPU, 1128MB RAM, 30GB Storage, therefore I would image this is small enough to run on a single physical server, although if I increased the resources for my VPS server, it would then be spread over multiple physical servers. If the physical server that my VPS server is sitting on went down, then my VPS server would pop up on a different physical server. The other great thing about VPS.net is that I can increase of decrease my VPS resources whenever I like, if this post got dugg on Digg or slashdotted on Slashdot then I could ramp up the resources for my server to stop it going down. How great is that!

This blog post has started to go a little off topic, and going back to yesterday’s question. Are we putting too much faith in “The Cloud”? In regards to cloud hosting I think you are wise to put your faith in cloud computing, you data should be safer and you site should be up more often compared to if you had a dedicated physical server. But remember, keep a backup of all your web sites.