Cloud hosting is an expression used to describe a distinct type of computing experience in which a large number of computers are connected through a real time communication server (mostly internet).
What is cloud hosting?
It is a kind of virtual server that is mainly used for sharing. For common it is means of storage or an extended hard disk in which we can store from anywhere in the world lest we are connected. The popularity of the term came from the companies who seem to market their product which can be sorted from a remote location. There are five different types of clouds namely, private cloud, public cloud, community cloud, hybrid cloud and distributed cloud. In marketing, cloud computing is mostly used to sell hosted products in the sense of application service provisioning that client server location at a remote location. Such services are given popular acronyms like ‘SaaS’ (software as a service), ‘PaaS’ (platform as a service), and ‘IaaS’ (infrastructure as a service),’HaaS’ (hardware as a service). Users access these cloud based applications through a web browser or a mobile app while the user software and the business data are stored on servers at remote locations.
Let’s find the origin:
In 1990’s telecommunication companies who previously offered point to point communication started offering virtual private network (VPN) services, with almost equal quality of service, but at a lower cost. By switching the overall traffic they saw that they could more use the network bandwidth more effectively. In the year 2000 after the dot com bubble amazon played a major role in cloud hosting. They modernized their data centers, which like other computer organizations were using only 10% of their capacity. Having found the new cloud architecture amazon launched Amazon web services (ACS), in the year 2006, on a utility computing basis. In 2008 EUCALYPTUS became the first of its kind open source API-compatible platform for deploying private clouds. The benchmark in this field was the launch of the IBM smart-cloud by IBM on March 1st, 2011. There framework was targeted to support smarter planet. With the other computer advancements cloud hosting found their silver piece.
Infrastructure as a service:
Most basic cloud service model, providers of IaaS offer computers or virtual machines and other resources. Examples of IaaS providers are amazon ec2; Google computes engine, HP cloud, windows azure, and ready space cloud services.
Platform as a service: they deliver a computing platform generally an operating system on cloud. Examples are engine yard, Mendix, open shift, Google app engine.
Software as a service: users are provided access to application software and database. Examples are Microsoft office 365, GT Nexus, Google apps.
The characteristics:
Agility: is improved with users’ ability to reprise technological infrastructure resources.
Cost: cloud space providers claim that cloud costs are much reduced as we can use the huge memory space available as many times as we want to.
Device and location independence: cloud hosting can be done from anywhere in the world. Cloud providers today enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of the device they use.
Virtualization: cloud allows us to share servers and storage devices, for which applications can be easily migrated over one device to another.
Security: security can be increased because of centralization of data, increased security focused resources and etc.