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Cloud hosting is rapidly growing in popularity but what exactly is it and how can it benefit your business?
Cloud hosting is rapidly growing in popularity but what exactly is it and how can it benefit your business? A Definition Of Cloud Hosting In the past, servers used for hosting web sites or databases were physical servers that had real components such as disk drives and processors. In contrast cloud servers are virtual; they run on the same servers but are not tied to the underlying physical hardware. By abstracting the hardware layer it is relatively easy to move the virtual server between physical servers and this is where the benefits of the cloud come into play. The Hypervisor Physical servers run a piece of software called a hypervisor which is the interface between the virtual machines running on it and the outside world. The hypervisor is a very small, highly efficient piece of code which offers the virtual machines the resources they need in terms of memory, processor and storage drivers. The main hypervisors today are VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen. Benefits Of Cloud Hosting The benefits of traditional hosting are varied and many. Reliability is the number one advantage and the cloud really does make a significant difference here. The traditional physical server is highly reliant on its hardware – i.e. if the processor or motherboard fails the server will suffer downtime; in most cases for some considerable amount of time as a new physical server is built. Even when taking advantage of RAID systems for disk storage it is very common for failures to occur. Cloud hosting" abstracts this hardware layer so if a physical server fails it is relatively straightforward to move the virtual server onto new hardware and continue. In some of the more advanced cloud systems this process is automated meaning virtually no downtime. There is one caveat though which is storage. Cloud systems use networked storage that is not directly attached to a physical server. Many, many virtual servers will thus be using the same disk storage and if a failure does occur then a significant outage may develop. Service providers take this risk seriously and the better ones will have replication of storage to ensure that they can switch over to a mirrored copy in the event of a hardware disaster. Scalability is the other big benefit of the cloud. In the typical physical server scenario if you start to run out of memory or processing power you need to buy more physical resource and insert them into the server. In some cases, the only thing viable will be to purchase a higher specification server and migrate the data from your legacy server. Both of these will require an amount of downtime which for most businesses will be unacceptable. In contrast, cloud hosting allows you to pool your hardware resources and allocate those to virtual servers at will. So for example, adding memory or processor is simply a configuration task which can be accomplished in seconds, without downtime. Summary Cloud hosting has a lot to offer and is starting to become the preferred option for business hosting. We have only scratched the surface here of what can be achieved, but hopefully you can see that the cloud is here to stay. There are many resources on the internet that offer a more in depth view so start reading and enjoy your move to a virtualised environment. ArticleSource: ArticlesAlley.com
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