Cloud Hosting is very simply using more than one computer to house and serve your data. For years, the model has always been your computer talking to another computer out there somewhere in the vast depths of the internet. If that foreign computer crashed, died, blew up, or was disconnected, and you didn’t have a good backup, you were cooked.

Enter Google. Google was the first company to really popularize the cloud. Instead of buying “enterprise” grade computer, they decided they’d use commodity computer hardware that was readily available, and cheap. Because these computers are more prone to failure under heavy load, they needed a way to insure they wouldn’t be losing any data when these computer inevitably gave up the ghost. They wrote a program that each of the computers runs called the Google File System. It says, in essence: Each piece of data must be stored in no less than 3 places, each on separate computers, on separate networks. This way no matter what kind of failure condition there is, the data will still exist and be accessible. This approach was so radical that many people shunned it, until it starting working really well for Google. Once that happened, companies with lots of resources started asking themselves, “Why not us?”

If you use Gmail, or many of the other Google services, you are using Google’s cloud computer, but beyond this, they never opened up their resources for the public. Amazon, the internet retailer of books, electronics, and just about everything else took the exact opposite approach: We have all this computing power, if you want some of it, we’ll sell you how ever much you’d like, at an insanely cheap price. Other companies have followed suit and now Cloud hosting and Cloud computing are the hot buzzwords you’ll see. The advantages of hosting “in the cloud” are:

  • Greater reliability
  • Scale. If you get hit with 2 million visitors, no problem, just buy more space “in the cloud”.
  • Redundancy. Since your data is stored multiple places, it’s backed up before it’s been backed up.
  • Speed. The cloud is HUGE and able to serve things very quickly.
  • Cost. Since the infrastructure is already there, and you’re buying only what you use, it can be very cheap to host in the cloud. I got a hosting bill from Amazon for $.03 last month.