What the heck is Cloud Hosting?

[Tinkertron]

I just got an offer for free cloud hosting from GoGrid Beta http://gogrid.com...

They compare thier service agaisnt Amazon EC2 serivce.

I know what web hosting is, but what is Cloud Hosting?

[SpywareDr]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_hosting

Cloud hosting: is a new type of hosting platform that allows customers powerful, scalable and reliable hosting based on clustered load-balanced servers and utility billing. Removing single-point of failures and allowing customers to pay for only what they use versus what they could use.

http://www.rackspace.co.uk/cloudclin...tionAndAnswer/

What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud Hosting (often also referred to as clustered hosting) is a step up from the shared hosting infrastructure that is commonly used today. By handling security, load balancing and server resources virtually you are no longer restricted to the limits of one physical piece of hardware. In basic terms, online operations are not limited to a single server, they have access to the processing power of a number of servers that are distributed in real time.

In a physical environment e.g. a web site is limited to the resource constraints that is housed within the physical unit/server (RAM, processing power, bandwidth etc). The concept of a cloud infrastructure no longer has this limitation - you can purchase as much computing power as you need from a virtually inexhaustible resource. The nature of the infrastructure means that scaling up and down is seemless (sic) and thus spikes in traffic aren't problematic.

Load-balancing occurs at the software level and is dynamically load-balanced across a number of servers. Servers can be added or removed from the cluster with no impact or downtime on hosted applications meaning less disruption for customers. The cloud architecture has the ability to provide small and medium enterprises the stability and resilience of a web hosting architecture that a few years ago only huge corporate organizations could obtain through huge IT expenditure.

Demystifying the Cloud
http://www.rackspace.co.uk/cloudclinic/

[Tinkertron]

So really cloud hosting is mostly for pros, i.t. folks and so on. Not just for any joe blow.

[jerryctx]

The ISP should handle the technical details so anyone can use it but you are correct that most people don't need the fail-safe operation or expandability.

[JPnyc]

it's similar to grid hosting, where resources are doled out on an as needed basis.