What is cloud hosting? The term cloud hosting is becoming very popular. To understand what cloud hosting is you must first know what cloud computing and web hosting mean. This article offers information on cloud computing, web hosting, and cloud hosting.

In order to understand what cloud hosting is, it’s important to first understand what cloud means and what cloud computing is. The cloud can refer to a network cloud—the unpredictable area that data moves through in a packet-switched network or be used as a synonym for cloud computing. Cloud computing refers to a server network connected in a way that allows the linked computers to share chores, rather than individual machines being responsible for the entirety of a task. That is, shared computing resources, rather than local resources (such as those on a personal device or local server) are used. Cloud computing aims to attain the high performance of supercomputing without the centralized location that mainframes used to have and stands in opposition to distributed computing. It reframes product as service.

Cloud computing makes people wary because it takes away control of computing resources from the end user and because even the brief inaccessibility of certain services, like Google Docs for a business that has moved from Office on individual computers to the shared documents service or other online application services, could be critical. Additionally, the feasibility of backups and of retrieving all one’s data and moving it to another service cause worries.

Cloud hosting is cloud computing used to serve web pages. Cloud hosting is sometimes known as cluster hosting or enterprise hosting. Rather than entire websites residing on a single server, or a single partition of a single server, each website has access to multiple servers, with the several servers sharing the tasks of serving the website.

The resources provided by cloud hosting are dynamically scalable to meets changing requirements. This means that, rather than having to estimate and always pay for the resources that your website needs on its busiest days—because with your website on a single server, if you don’t have the necessary resources on a shared or dedicated server, your website may go down—you can stop guessing about what might be, pay for the service used, and know that more bandwidth, disk storage, and other resources are always available to your site.

When choosing cloud hosting, it’s important to do your research.  It has been known that a web host that has a good reputation for server-based hosting may not provide the same quality service for cloud hosting. Before choosing cloud hosting, you need to know a lot about:

• the security (from data encryption to network security to site security)

• the up-time guarantee and the up-time record

• the backup plan

• the maintenance schedule

• the ability to get backups of your entire site (including all your documents if you use cloud-based documents), no matter how large, in a reasonable and timely fashion

• how long the company has been in business and whether it’s financially stable

• what their customers say about them (and not just in the clipped quotes they choose to put up on their site)