To understand the concept of cloud hosting, it’s necessary to understand the concept of “cloud computing.” In its basic form, “cloud computing” refers to software applications and processes that are stored on and delivered via the Internet. Everything that’s used or created within these online applications is also stored online. The advantage to this is that you can access these files from wherever there’s an Internet connection. This information isn’t kept on a single computer, but on a computer cluster that’s networked together to act as one.

Cloud hosting (also known as cloud web hosting) resembles cloud computing, except that the files and applications for your web site are uploaded to the web hosting provider. These are then distributed across the entire cluster of computers. The advantages to this method are authentically unlimited processing power, storage and bandwidth, since data is automatically re-routed to other serves in the cluster if one machine goes down. Cloud hosting is also referred as cloud computing hosting or cloud server hosting. The later term is derives itself from the fact that this hosting environment is based on various cloud servers clustered in a network.

Cloud hosting differs from shared housing in that it uses many more computers to create the network. Instead of hosting all your website files on a single server, which could be “hacked” or compromised by “malware,” cloud computing regularly re-distributes data among the many servers in the cluster. This makes it harder for security breaches to occur. In addition, cloud hosting makes it possible for your websites to have any additional resources it may need for peak traffic or increased data storage. The best advantage of cloud hosting is that you only pay for the bandwidth you use plus a fixed monthly charge for each server instance you have in a cloud.

Currently there are quite a few cloud hosting providers that offer their service in open market. These include RackSpace cloud hosting and Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud”, which is also known as ‘Amazon EC2′. At the time of writing, the planet internet services had it’s cloud hosting service in beta testing phase, so we can expect this company to become a cloud hosting provider anytime soon. There are other cloud hosting providers in the pipeline so there should be more choice by second quarter of 2011. It is anticipated that these cloud hosts will likely change the landscape of traditional web hosting services as a major segment of the web hosting customers would move to cloud hosts, mainly because of the flexibility and wider scalability of hosting clouds.

In months to come, more customers may be looking for best cloud hosting services over the internet than any other web hosting product available. It is important to note that cloud hosting brings an array of benefits for those looking for business web hosting solutions. These benefits includes low price, scalability and flexibility of this new technology.

Stay tuned and check back soon for more details about cloud hosting and its advantages for companies looking for premium business hosting
solutions.