Hi there,

Although being buzzwords "Cloud Computing" and "Cloud Hosting" are somehow defined. However, when it comes to Cloud hosting service, most people think that this is some from of virtualization and VPS. I have seen many providers which run some form of Virtual Private Hosting, deal with flexibility and scalability and claim to run Cloud computing generation hosting service. It is OK!

But I'd would like to discuss with you any particular niches of the new Cloud computing based Hosting service market. Let's start with "Shared Cloud Hosting".

I'd define such Cloud hosting service as one delivered from a system of computing nodes (servers) in which virtual hosting accounts (equivalent of those in standard Shared Hosting) share the resources of the whole Cloud (all servers in the system) while data resides on shared storage area network.

Please join the thread and say what do you think! I didn't say anything about advantages and disadvantages in order to leave the thread "open". So it is you now.

Do you mean like their platform? http://www.cloudweb.com/

via AppLogic

I would hazard a guess that "shared cloud hosting" is a fancy way to say "virtualized data center" a-la VMWare V-Sphere.

Before grids were clouds and just grids the actual application would need to be “grid enabled” to be able to split workloads across multiple compute nodes (a-la IBM WebSphere/Information Server). This required a head (controller) node and SAN as you mentioned.

So technically you could setup shared hosting to use multiple compute nodes to handle your website or sell time on your Apache Hadoop cluster. But I imagine the firms selling cloud hosting are selling virtual machine access that runs atop V-Sphere (a better case).

The quickest way to know how “cloud” their hosting service is to ask them simply to describe what happens when I visit a webpage on their “cloud”. How does your cloud handle HTTP requests?

I don't because I don't know the business of this company. However I know AppLogic platform. It looks to follow the above described concept, but I'm sure I'm missing something.

How does your cloud handle HTTP requests?

Using a web server ;) Now serious. It is balancing them across multiple web servers!

What handles state and sessions for the multiple servers?

The biggest advantage to using Cloud Hosting is you get much better uptime. People who are not happy with their Shared hosting service due to poor uptime will happily pay a little more for Cloud Hosting, especially those who cannot afford a Dedicated Server. But they could just be unlucky though and do not actually need Cloud Hosting. Their provider might just be overloading their Shared servers is all.

If they're overloading whether by choice or by an honest mistake and not expecting the growth they did with the customers on that server, cloud will also help address that. Redundancy, high availability, and scalability are the key benefiting factors of Cloud Web Hosting. Need more RAM? Flip a switch. Need more CPU? Flip a switch. Need more storage space? Flip a switch. Server crashing? Flip a switch. Need to migrate to another network? Flip a switch.

These are all benefits of Cloud, and if developed properly you don't even need to flip the switches.. it can be done automatically.

To be quite honest, I can only laugh at the hard work, effort, single points of failures, and silly situations that we encountered doing hosting without Cloud. We've been doing cloud for less than a year and what I wouldn't give to have done that for the previous 11 years. Our business has changed entirely, and I haven't looked back once.

What handles state and sessions for the multiple servers?

Sorry, but the question is too general and at the same time I don't feel proper to discuss our own technology (it would be self-promotion). I'd rather stay on the topic?

I'd say our clustered load balanced platform fits this description. You host a site on the system as you would with any other shared hosting platform - but your site is automatically load balanced across dozens of servers without you having to configure and manage any servers, re-size any instances or purchase any new nodes. You just upload your site, and pay based on your usage.

On the other hand, most people that describe their hosting as "cloud" shared hosting will typically just be installing cPanel on a low powered virtualized instance that just happens to be hosted on a cloud. This type of setup is good on the one hand because it protects against some type of common failures - e.g. critical hardware issue on the host node server. However, it doesn't really protect against the absolute most common issues, which are largely software rather than hardware.

Hi there,

Although being buzzwords "Cloud Computing" and "Cloud Hosting" are somehow defined. However, when it comes to Cloud hosting service, most people think that this is some from of virtualization and VPS. I have seen many providers which run some form of Virtual Private Hosting, deal with flexibility and scalability and claim to run Cloud computing generation hosting service. It is OK!

But I'd would like to discuss with you any particular niches of the new Cloud computing based Hosting service market. Let's start with "Shared Cloud Hosting".

I'd define such Cloud hosting service as one delivered from a system of computing nodes (servers) in which virtual hosting accounts (equivalent of those in standard Shared Hosting) share the resources of the whole Cloud (all servers in the system) while data resides on shared storage area network.

Please join the thread and say what do you think! I didn't say anything about advantages and disadvantages in order to leave the thread "open". So it is you now.
Regardless of how you term such architecture, what you have described is going to be one very viable choice for shared hosters, moving forward.

Cheers!

It's redundant to say "shared cloud".

Regards
Joe / UNIXY

It's redundant to say "shared cloud".

Regards
Joe / UNIXY

I'd agree if we assume that in Cloud computing hosting infrastructures the information (date) is stored in a shared pool. But when say "Cloud" most people mean a scalable VPS. There would be other types of Cloud hosting IaaS. For example one for Shared Hosting.