In our rush to get to the future, we have come up with some tremendous ways to make our lives much easier and more convenient. One of these inventions came in the form of cloud computing. As much as we have heard that term thrown around, most of us still ask ourselves, How does Cloud Hosting Work?
In order to answer this question, we need to define quite a number of things. For starters, we have to know what the ‘cloud’ actually is. Then we can go further into the intricacies of how cloud computing and hosting works.
What is the cloud?
Technical geniuses go into a great deal of jargon trying to explain what the cloud is. For the sake of simplicity, we will stay away from technical jargon and explain it as plainly as we can. The cloud is a virtual storage space that exists over a common network such as the internet.
This is to say that there are very many computers connected to one another via the internet. The space and the service that these computers provide for whoever prompts a response from them is what we mostly refer to as the cloud. The cloud is therefore not a physical thing or place. You cannot point to it nor show it to someone, but you can experience and benefit from its services. It is similar to the internal office network at your workplace, only there are no on-site servers.
How does Cloud Hosting Work?
Cloud hosting works in the very same way as regular hosting only there are no on-site servers. All the servers work as a network of computers that are linked through the internet. This network allows for a tremendous amount of space, processing speed and backup facilities.
There could be 10 or 100 computers within one cloud network. That is the beauty of cloud computing, it is very scalable. These computers behave as a single storage unit that can be accessed by authorized individuals or connections. These are the people being hosted by this particular network. The actual data, such as your HTML and CSS files are stored in clusters that are spread out over these networked computers.
Every single computer within a specific cloud has a specified task to carry out. This means that the resources you may need to run your website are spread across all these computers and are called upon or rendered when you need them. This is what gives cloud hosting such tremendous speed. That and the fact that these computers actually have very good processors.
In case of an overload on one of the computers or a failure of any kind in any of the computers, the other computers within the network will kick in to temporarily pick up the slack. This is why almost everybody is going the cloud hosting way, because the backup facilities are incredible, there is no in-house servers and you always have connectivity.
Simply put, the divide and conquer concept is the main driving force behind cloud hosting. Everything is spread out over a wide network and thus making all functions faster and always available.
