Getting to the truth of the cloud.
With thousands of cloud solutions lingering out there, and more popping up daily, many are still left wondering what exactly the cloud is and why it matters. Contributing to the confusion, each cloud hosting provider puts a different spin on it. But at its heart, cloud hosting, sometimes known as cloud computing, is a relatively simple concept—albeit, a complex idea for hosting providers to implement successfully.
With cloud hosting, hardware limitations become a non-issue and the hardware itself becomes invisible. You are purchasing computing power as a utility, like you do water or electricity. But like utilities, just because the hardware is invisible, that does not mean the hardware and the infrastructure behind a specific cloud is irrelevant. They are very important, seeing as they drastically influence a cloud's usability, features, performance, security and uptime.
In a nutshell, cloud hosting removes the limitations of a physical server's power and space by replacing it with a virtualized cluster of servers that businesses can burst into when they require more computing resources—RAM, CPU, bandwidth. Instead of having to provision, set up, kick start, manage and pay for a new server every time server usage spikes, customers simply tap into resources that are standing by, ready to work in a short amount of time. And when you're done consuming the resources, they can be turned off. This is known as "power on demand."
