Beta Launch April 20th 2012

There is alot of confusion and disagreement in the industry as to what Cloud Hosting actually is. When I look around it seems everyone has a different idea and offer up differing definitions as to what Cloud Hosting but when you break it down there is an underlying foundation that I believe all would agree on. I’m going to explain what Cloud Hosting means to me.

Cloud Hosting Rant

One recurring theme in the Cloud Hosting industry is complexity and the desire to use technical terms to impress the inner geek of a cloud hosting client. Heard of IaaS or PaaS or SaaS? New acronyms are certainly making new companies feel pretty important. In these companies their Sales people are probably called Sales Engineers, making a mockery of real engineers everywhere. How about this acronym – KISS? The Cloud Hosting industry needs a severe dose of simplicity whilst retaining its technological edge and that’s going to be my approach with AtomicVPS. I want to make Cloud Hosting accessible, interesting and easy to understand so the standard hosting user and average webmaster can enjoy the benefits of the cloud without having to take a Computer Science degree and remortgaging their house. So what is Cloud Hosting?

Infrastructure

When hosting in a Cloud your website is being powered by a cluster of servers. Your website applications and files will reside on a Storage Area Network (SAN) or use Local Storage (basically a bunch of servers bound together in an array). At AtomicVPS we will be using the SAN model but we also plan to use the Local Storage model at some point. Connected to the SAN (or local storage network) you have the Hypervisors. On an OnApp system (the cloud software we are using) the hypervisors provide the CPU and Memory to all the Cloud “VMs” (Virtual Machines). A VM is basically a VPS – it’s a virtual server. So you have your Cloud hardware which at its basic level is some kind storage and then multiple servers providing the CPU and Memory power and then everything is divided into VMs. For instance at first we’ll create 6 VMs (cPanel Shared, cPanel Reseller, Plesk Linux Shared, Plesk Linux Reseller. Plesk Windows Shared, Plesk Windows Reseller) and we’ll have 2 Dual CPU machines each with at least 24gb memory powering everything.

So you could think of Cloud Hosting like Clustered VPS Hosting. Instead of your VPS (VM) being on one server’s 4 drive RAID 10 array it’s spread around multiple RAID 10 arrays and separate machines give it the CPU and Memory power you need. Simple, right?

Redundancy

The second point that most people can agree upon is redundancy. Cloud Hosting should have no single Points Of Failure and that’s the reason for having many pieces of hardware powering sites on a cloud. On standard hosting if a server fails any sites on the server will naturally be down until the problem is fixed. If a memory stick goes bad, power supply fails, RAID array goes bad – all mean downtime for sites on a standard server. On a cloud the memory and CPU is being powered by multiple hypervisors so if one fails there are others to take up the slack. The SAN can tolerate huge amounts of disk of RAID failures and also has redundant power supplies. The internal network of the cloud should have multiple in-line switches for network redundancy.

Scalability

For me this is the most important factor of Cloud Hosting and the major limiting factor of standard hosting. On an old hosting server if sites start using too much CPU or Memory we have no choice but to boot off heavy users or relocate some accounts to other servers. On a cloud you can just add more hypervisors if you need need more power. On old standard hosting if a server’s drive fills up you have to relocate some clients or do some major house cleaning. On a cloud you can just add SANs or add to the local storage network. So everything is scalable and there are no bottlenecks anywhere.

On AtomicVPS clients will be able to host sites on standard shared hosting, except it’s backed up by all the promise of the cloud and that means service overall is a lot more reliable. Clients will also be able to buy their own Cloud VMs (essentially a Cloud VPS) and we’ll be offering VMs with both Linux and Windows. A Cloud VM is a huge step up in the world for VPS clients as it’s on VPS nodes that we most commonly see all the CPU and Memory bottlenecks.

So there you go, Cloud Hosting in easy to understand terms.