What is Cluster Hosting?

Clustered hosting, sometimes called cloud hosting is a web hosting service that uses virtualization technology to further enhance security and system resources spread across several servers. In essence , clustered hosting gives you and your website the benefits and added resources of using several servers at once.  With a normal web hosting service, you are usually limited by how much bandwidth, disk space, processing speed, RAM, and other resources that have been allocated to your hosting account.    With clustered hosting, you are not bound by these restrictions, because your hosting account has access to hardware that is practically infinite. This clustered server infrastructure allows you to upgrade with ease, and places no limits on your productivity.

Why Would You Need Clustered Hosting?

Many people find themselves in a situation where upgrading is absolutely necessary, and sometimes the limits they have placed on their won website is what ultimately results in downtime and lost business.   Even if the site does not go down for a long period of time, it may become sluggish, causing visitors to abandon your web site.  However, with clustered hosting you have access to a cluster of web servers,  giving your website all of the resources it would ever need to succeed. The best part about clustered hosting is that you don’t need to plan ahead to upgrade. As soon as your website is in need of some extra power, it will be drawn from the cluster of available services, ensuring you always have the resources needed.

Additional Benefits to Clustered Hosting

The advantages of clustered web hosting are obvious, in that it presents unlimited efficiency and scalability. Your website literally has unlimited potential with clustered hosting, as it is not restricted by  the confines of one server. Sudden traffic surges will no longer cause your website to run slowly, and your visitors will continue to return because of this. You may be wondering how you have access to these features without having to upgrade. The answer is simple, and it is one of the biggest benefits involved with clustered hosting. Clustered hosting services are paid ion a similar manner to a pay-as-you-go service, meaning you are billed at the end of each service period depending on how much resources are used during the billing period.

For these reasons, you’ll never have to worry about predicting how busy your website is going to be, and you will be sure that it can handle even the most incredible traffic surges.  Clustered hosting is perfect for a confident entrepreneur that believes their new website may be capable of out performing the limits of a shared hosting plan.

What is Cloud Hosting?

Also known as clustered hosting, cloud hosting is a solution that often uses virtualization technology to facilitate load balancing, security and system resources over multiple servers.  This basically means that instead of relying a single piece of hardware, your website and applications can benefit from the resources of multiple servers.   In the typical shared hosting environment, a website is limited to the bandwidth, disk space, RAM, processing power and others resources allocated to the physical machine.  Cloud hosting is a concept that frees you of these limitations, providing you with on-demand access to an infrastructure that is virtually inexhaustible.  The mere structure of the cloud makes it easy to scale up or down based on your individual requirements.

Who Needs Cloud Hosting?

Throughout the years, a countless number of websites have been the victims of their own success.  This is the website then ends up suffering because of its sudden boost in popularity and traffic.  The environment in which this situation occurs the most is shared web hosting.  Once your website exceeds the limitations of a single physical server, it is susceptible to choking.   Cloud hosting is the perfect alternative as it gives you access to a cluster of servers, allowing your website to benefit from additional bandwidth, RAM, processing power and other resources it might require.  The major selling point to this solution as that you can obtain this extra boost in computing power when you need it.  If the popularity of your website subsides a bit, you can easily place the resources back into the cloud and make them available to other users.

Are There Other Benefits?

Cloud hosting services offer benefits from numerous angles.  The most obvious advantages are its scalability and cost efficiency.  Being that cloud computing is a highly scalable technology, websites and applications can be expanded greatly thanks to the additional resources.  Dealing with slow responses and frequent crashes just because your site experienced a sudden surge in traffic is a common thing in the shared hosting environment.  The cloud’s scalability allows you to avoid this problem with ease.  Another major benefit of cloud hosting is the flexible pay-per-usage model.  When signing up with a provider, you are only charged for the amount of computing power you use, similar to how you pay for your gas and electrical bill.   No longer do you have to lease and maintain a costly and complex dedicated server just to improve performance.   These are a few of many benefits that have made the cloud the talk of the IT world.

The Infamous Twitter Hack

What is being dubbed as the “Twitter Hack” has some questioning whether security is an issue for the phenomenon that is cloud computing.  The incident that sparked the debate was actually the hacking of a Google Apps account belonging to a Twitter employee.  It has been reported that the exploit occurred because one of Twitter’s co-founders create a password for Google Apps that was easily guessed by a hacker.  This in turn, enabled the hacker to access the user’s personal information, including the data on his wife’s personal computer.

A War of the Words

Andy Cordial, managing director of data storage solutions firm Origin Storage, stated that a large number of companies and their employees are becoming victims of the cloud.  Cordial’s logic is that because cloud computing is so prevalent, businesses are being rushed into it and forced “to adapt their IT security systems on the fly.” He remarked that Origin Storage saw the shift in the business industry on the horizon and that all the security “breaches occurring on the cloud front” is proof that there are discrepancies that still need to be resolved.  Although the cloud shouldn’t necessarily take all the blame for the most recent debacle, the news isn’t certainly isn’t making anyone feel any better about the overall security of Twitter or Google Apps.

Evan Williams, the Twitter co-founder who essentially caused his wife’s Gmail webmail account to be compromised, explained to blog site TechCrunch, that the hack was absolutely not due to a lack of security on the part of Twitter.  However, Andy Cordial stressed that if Twitter would have paid more focus on security rather than growing their user base at all cost, the company wouldn’t be in the midst of a such an embarrassing situation.  Cordial added that implementing encryption into an organization’s data storage arrangement, be it in on or off the cloud, will ensure that information stored on the server and in transit is protected from malicious intent.  His final shot at the Twitter co-founder was that creating a secure password on top of encryption and sound corporate policies would have likely prevented the matter.  However, it should be stated that it was personal user accounts, not business accounts that were compromised.

Who’s to Blame?

Who should take the bullet for the so-called Twitter Hack?  Is it really the fault of the cloud, or should blame lie with Google apps or the victim?  While it is probably a good combination of all parties, one would think that a co-founder and active member of what is arguably the most popular social networking platform of the moment would have the know-how to be a little more responsible.   In any event, this breach probably will not convince many of the users who are still concerned about internet security any time soon.

Ryan Block, live.gdgt.com co-founder, was able to present a real-world demonstration on the power and value of cloud computing through his blog using Rackspace’s Cloud Sites solution.  With the help of his photographer, he was able to simultaneously capture and upload images in real-time to the Cloud Files service, which is automatically integrated into the site.  This activity all took place while serving an estimated 656 page views per second to worldwide viewers with minimal cost and hassle.

Mr. Block said the Rackspace Cloud enabled his team to quickly iterate and scale their live coverage without needing to make major investments in hardware or operations.  He says that the Rackspace support staff went above and beyond to help prepare for the event, providing essential input and attentiveness to maintain availability despite the unbelievably heavy traffic load.

The Cloud Sites solutions sells for $100 per month while Cloud Files is available on a pay-as-you-go basis with service starting at $0.15 per GB of data.  With Cloud Files, customers have the option of serving content files leveraging the Limelight Networks CDN (content delivery network) in real-time without any extra efforts and only paying for what they need.  Rackspace customers also get the benefit of 24/7 Fanatical Support for any questions of concerns they may have about their hosting account at no additional cost.

The approximate cost difference between the DIY hosting approach opposed to deploying Cloud Sites or Cloud Files for this type of event portrays the cost benefits of cloud computing.  Physical space, hardware, software and management costs for a state of the art data center capable of handling such a traffic load would cost tens of thousands of dollars.  When utilizing Rackspace’s cloud solutions, it is likely to only cost a couple hundred dollars.

The Rackspace Cloud delivers on-demand website, application and storage hosting backed by some of the best support in the industry.  Through a suite of cloud solutions in Cloud Sites, Cloud Files and Cloud Servers, the Rackspace Cloud gives knowledgeable IT managers and developers the ability to reduce the high-cost investments and hassles associated with dedicated hardware, all while allowing them to easily scale their hosting resources.

About Rackspace

A leader in the industry of hosting services, Rackspace Hosting is changing the way businesses around the world approach their IT operations.  The company provides a number of solutions including computing-as-a-service, incorporating the latest innovations into a highly flexible offering that makes computing more reliable and affordable.  Rackspace specializes in solutions that enable businesses and IT teams to be more efficient.  Distinguished by its award-winning Fanatical Support, the company continues on its mission be one of the best service providers in the world.  The Rackspace portfolio includes a number of hosted IT services such as Managed Hosting, Cloud hosting, email and application hosting.

Prior to the merger in May of 2009, both providers operated their VMware-based cloud hosting solutions independently.  Thanks to their strikingly similar infrastructures, scalable platforms and dedication to support, the integration process was seamless, going off without a hitch.

Art Zeile, HostMySite CEO, revealed that the company will continue to integrate HostMySite and Hosting.com cloud computing solutions at a fast pace to deliver highly sought after, client-centric services to the virtual and cloud markets.  He says the name Cloud 9 was chosen because it is already an established cloud hosting band.  According to Zeile, these two new solutions will provide customers with an unparalleled level of flexibility and control.

Cloud 9 Enterprise provides customers with an on-demand cloud hosting solution via a secure web portal, giving businesses the ability to quickly deploy virtual servers and modify their resources on an as-needed basis.  The service is quite comparable to a virtual private server yet offers the additional benefits of high availability and adaptability.  Cloud 9 Enterprise doesn’t require any contracts, allowing customers to provision and incorporate resources such as RAM, storage and RAM online in a matter of minutes.

Cloud 9 Private delivers virtual, clustered environments at a price considerably lower than traditional dedicated server solutions.  The service provides an enhanced level of scalability, fault tolerance and security in an isolated environment occupied by a single tenant.

News of the merger was HostMySite.com’s first major announcement since acquiring Hosting.com.  Company reps are confident that several business clients will make use of the Cloud 9 Enterprise and Cloud 9 Private solutions to extend their internal cloud environments to geographically distributed infrastructures in its SAS 70 Type II certified data centers.

HostMySite/Hosting.com is said to be working closely with the VMware platform to deliver enterprise-class cloud hosting solutions to businesses of all sizes.  The company is actively participating in the VMware vCloud Initiative and working side by side with VMware to launch trial-offer cloud hosting services for virtual appliances and general hosting needs.  Enterprise and small to medium sized businesses can leverage the benefits of the VMware virtualization platform via both the Cloud 9 Enterprise and Cloud 9 Private solutions.

About HostMySite/Hosting.com

As a fully merged entity, HostingMySite/Hosting.com provides enterprise-level dedicated and colocation hosting, managed hosting, cloud computing, disaster recovery and business continuity services to a global base of customers.  The company operates multiple world-class data centers in California, Delaware and Kentucky with another facility currently being constructed in Denver, Colorado.  The HostMySite/Hosting.com infrastructure is designed to support business clients who run mission-critical operations and demand a high level of availability.

Cost Effective Implementation – With a cloud hosting solution, there is no need to invest in any costly hardware, software or licenses.  Instead of making costly upfront investments, you simply add or subtract from the cloud as your needs change.  In most of these setups, you simply pay for the only the services you use.

Scalability – When IT departments anticipate enormous spikes in user load, they usually have to purchase additional hardware and software components to make it happen.  This isn’t the case with cloud hosting.  The hosting provider’s IT infrastructure typically offers all the resources you need.  Once again, you only pay for what you need and use.

Technical Expertise – When an emerging technology hits the market, it is common for a plethora of companies to jump on the proverbial bandwagon.  Unfortunately, some of them don’t have the expertise to leverage it effectively.  However, many vendors have been able to master cloud computing technology to the point where they can offer customers a highly reliable service.  This is made possible by state of the art data centers, high performance hardware and tremendous computing capacity.  The companies relying on this technology range from industry leading names like Microsoft and IBM to Google and IBM.

Optimized Resource Usage – Clouding hosting services allow businesses to shift the burdens of in-house IT tasks to third-party professionals.  This in turn, gives IT departments the opportunity to concentrate on mission-critical tasks without incurring additional costs on manpower and training.

Higher Availability - Outages and service interruptions can have a serious impact on normal business operations.  With the right cloud hosting solution, you have immediate access to 24/7 customer service and technical support to address emergency situations.  Even though cloud computing is susceptible to outages and other problems, a knowledgeable staff of technicians can dramatically reduce the threat of downtime.

Cloud Considerations

While there are many advantages to cloud computing, this technology does have some drawbacks, mainly security risks.  On the other hand, several providers offering these hosting solutions employ strict privacy policies along with advanced security measures to protect their customers.  This includes various cryptographic schemes to authenticate users and strong encryption algorithms to protect data while its in transit to third-party cloud servers.  This gives cloud hosting providers the ability to provide a much greater level of security than many businesses can achieve in-house.

Lew Moorman, Chief Strategy Officer at Rackspace Hosting, notes that he is surprised more small businesses are not taking advantage of the cloud services currently available.  Moorman says that while relatively new, cloud is a proven technology with the ability to suit the needs of businesses of all sizes.  Even more surprising is that nearly 60% of the survey respondents in the both the U.S. and U.K. reported having no plans to utilize cloud hosting in the future.

Executives at Rackspace believe most small businesses are shying away from the technology because they don’t completely understand the benefits it offers over traditional hosting solutions.  While all that might be true, another reason small organizations may be eluding the cloud is because they feel it is a cost prohibitive solution.  After all, new technologies often are.  If small businesses knew there was a way to enjoy scalability and cost efficiency, they would probably be more intrigued by the concept of cloud hosting.  Ironically enough, Rackspace has the answer with its hybrid hosting solution.

The Rackspace Cloud

Rackspace’s hybrid hosting solution is compromised is three core elements:

Cloud Sites – As the company’s flagship cloud solution, Cloud Sites offer a scalable platform designed for supporting huge traffic spikes on a pay as you go basis.  The environment is cross-platform, compatible with both Linux and Windows systems.

Cloud Files - This is Rackspace’s web-based storage service that provides developers with instant access to an enterprise-class infrastructure that improves scalability.  Through its partnership with Limelight Networks, Rackspace gives developers the ability to distribute content to millions of users across the world all while reducing upfront investment and IT-related costs.  This service comes with an industry leading SLA and competitive pricing model with storage starting from $0.15 per GB and bandwidth from $0.22 per GB.

Cloud Servers – The latest in Rackspace’s cloud hosting solution, Cloud Servers is set to provide server capacity to businesses of all sizes at their request.  This solution will leverage powerful technology developed by Slicehost, a company Rackspace recently acquired.  Known for its Xen virtualization software, Slicehost will stay on for the project and develop new innovative features in conjunction with the creative initiatives of Rackspace.

Rackspace is a global leader in web hosting solutions.  Aside from its cloud technology, the provider also specializes in managed dedicated servers and email hosting.  The company is well known for its award-winning Fanatical Support and recognized by Fortune Magazine as one of the best 100 companies to work for in the U.S.