Cloud hosting is the term evolved in this decade and it is the trending thing now. Everyone thinks it’s so cool to have their application ” on the cloud “.
I am, in this article trying to explain, what is cloud hosting and why is it important and who are the major players in the cloud market!
Legacy Servers
A legacy server is a bare metal server where you will get the whole physical hardware of the server for your use. If a hardware failure happens your server will be offline until it’s fixed.
Bare metal servers are cheap. But it posses a potential risk of down time in case any hardware or power issue happens. So if you are selecting a bare metal server, you have to go for those with redundant power supply and RAID protection so that you wont end up with data loss incase your hard disk gets corrupted. You should also make sure that you keep your data safe in a off server backup.
There are many providers offering cheap backup servers like backupsy.
Another issue with legacy bare metal servers is its relative cost. If you have a small application which do not need that much CPU and ram, you will still end up paying for what you do not use.
It was then came the virtualisation. The virtualisation platforms like virtuozzo and kvm and zen arrived. Then people started to work on how to achieve 100% uptime as virtualisation also had the similar issues of the server going down if there is any hardware issues.
Emergence of the Cloud Hosting
It was then engineers were able to make multiple bare metal servers run together under one OS and they were able to use the combined CPU and RAM and storage of the servers to power application which need 100% uptime – like google.com and many other financial institutions.
So when you hear the term cloud hosting, it means that they have mutiple hardwares to power your servers and there are less chances that the server goes down unless it is a scheduled maintenance.
Major players in the cloud hosting market are
Rackspace
Linode
Azure
And many others.
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