Real Defination of Cloud Hosting
titaniumboy
Member
Hello everyone, i know it's a dumb question. But i want to clear my doubt. What is a cloud hosting ? What is the difference between cloud hosting?
I have searched on Google, most of the blogs says Cloud Hosting allows you to spread your data across multiple, interconnected servers, located across a wide geographical area.
Is it like that if our visitor is from US then cloud hosting will connect to US or the nearest location to ensure better speed? If it is then some providers also sells Cloud VPS but we get a fixed location in that like Germany , US , Finland etc.
Please tell me real Defination of Cloud Hosting and what is the difference between cloud and shared hosting. and if we take a cloud vps and install any panel on that and sell that panel to other people then that is called cloud hosting or shared hosting?
Comments
It just means "elsewhere" compared to "On Premises" or hosting it yourself. You can naturally spread it across further since you are not hosting it on local building yourself.
In short, cloud is someone else's computer.
For me, cloud means they are selling infrastructure rather than a raw vps.
That means shared hosting is also a cloud hosting? because shared hosting is hosted on hosting provider's server
Yes
For me cloud is paying per use and time. Easy upgrade/downgrade. Additional services like block storage, firewall etc.
Not every "cloud hosting" is the same (or "cloud" for that matter).
A bit longer drivel on the topic (though still quite short and oversimplified):
https://io.bikegremlin.com/7611/hosting-types/#1.2
Only OVH has done a real cloud hosting.
OVH is the real thing. No one can beat them.
It means Hetzner and some other providers are lying
As per https://io.bikegremlin.com/7611/hosting-types/#1.2
Cloud system consists of many separate computers/servers connected over the Internet. means in Cloud, provider have multiple servers connected together. If one server goes down then another server will be up and our website will live from another server. All server have our website data.
But in Hetzner and some provider, they provide us a virtual private server. Are they lying to us?
No . Cloud is more marketing word . Properly said in some data centers around the world.
High availability is when you have more servers so if someone has some issue your app/ website is not down. But it is extremely expensive solution
Yup.
Marketing people don't lie - they are C R E A T I V E!
Hetzner enters the chat.
The Germans came close, yes. But it was the French that sent data to the sky, literally.
Trust the French to burn down everything that they care.
It's a marketing term at the end of the day, and thus has no true meaning. Like 'Luxury Car' or 'Professional Service'.
Not even that covers it once marketeers get their teeth in
WD describe their My Cloud NAS box range as 'personal cloud storage devices'
Yeah imagination is powerful
professional service ??? Which is the another term clueless amateur service?
When there is a VPS, it usually runs on single physical server and if that server fails, there is no VPS anymore. If VPS is running on cloud infrastructure (or high availability cluster), failure of single physical machine won't bring your VPS (or cloud server) down. My all infrastructure is almost 100% based on cloud, since availability is the primary aim. Single points of failure exists still, but I'm happy with cloud so far. It's the direction all web hosting industry is moving. And there is no way back.
Must be included in k8s ecosystem
I always thought of 'the cloud' as a pool of resources spread across multiple physical hardware nodes to reduce points of failure. Never considered multi-locations a requirement, just that if hardware dies, goes offline due to maintenance or whatever, that other pooled resources that are still available pick up the load.
Not sure how OnApp does it nowadays, but back when they were first getting started and I was looking at their papers that is more or less what it was. Minimum requirement was basically a large storage node and two hypervisors or something relatively basic. I guess that is more of a 'high availability' setup, but these are all just words.
Cloud is just another word for Server.
Its not certified neither does it guarantee you anything.
Here is OVH mirroring your data to the cloud.
It's not a marketing term and it's not high availability. If someone calls it cloud you should have clear expectations, and in my experience you can rely on those expectations in almost every case, if your expectations are not being set by an incorrect definition.
To put it in more visual terms, cloud providers are the ones where you can spin up VMs and adjust resources on your side. If you order, pay invoice, and wait for the VPS to be provisioned that isn't a cloud provider. If you get access to a panel where you can spin up your own VMs as desired, that is a cloud provider. Most often these will be billed hourly and/or by each resource. This is AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean, Vultr, etc.
High availability is not an alternate term for cloud. It is a direct misinformation campaign used by hosts that are jealous that their SolusVM license doesn't compete with the convenience of cloud, and that they can't afford to develop a cloud hosting control panel. It is further propagated by people who receive and fall for the misinformation. High availability is more of what you're referring to, and what @bikegremlin thinks is cloud here: https://io.bikegremlin.com/7611/hosting-types/#1.2 (that blog is incorrect @bikegremlin, built in redundancy is not a part of the definition for cloud computing, though the ability to be redundant by use of multiple locations could be)
Cloud isn't just some random word with no meaning:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-145/final
But hosts that feel like they can't achieve this highly desirable cloud computing service really want you to think it's a buzzword. Personally, I despise the idea that these providers run around lying to users to downplay the value of their perceived competitors. It's a very popular thing to do on WHT, for example.
If you use the real definition as clearly defined and sourced in that Wikipedia article, you will rarely be lied to. You will find that every well known provider who sells "cloud" will match up with your definition. If you follow the "cloud = high availability" definition that people make up, every provider will fail to meet the definition because it's well known that full redundancy is best configured at the application layer. There's no justification for using the false definition except to attack competitors. It's written by reputable sources like NIST, it matches reality, that's the definition.
Go forth and educate buyers so that they don't fall for the lies of failing legacy web hosts on WHT.
With all that said, there was a marketing event that got it horribly wrong:
Just search the provider name here: https://registry.terraform.io/
If the provider has a popular provider module there, then it can be considered cloud.
Some smaller providers does have some cloud features, but they are not included in the ecosystem and makes them hard to use as a cloud
@jar thanks for devoting almost an hour to provide the most accurate definition of cloud.
But I can't blame any user, who expects high availability when ordering cloud server, because that's the trend set by large providers:
Cloud computing[1] is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user.[2] Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each location being a data center.Can't squeeze 64 cores from single Ryzen 3**0x (so popular here) dedicated server when needed, so infrastructure, which allows to scale fast, most likely involves more physical devices and the means to withstand operation failures overall. Cloud, by definition, doesn't guarantee high availability, but it is usually the service, which lets you to expect that feature.
Name one large provider that set the expectation of inherent redundancy in cloud computing.
The ability to spin up in different locations to aid in the building of redundant applications doesn't qualify.
If these availability numbers may be achieved without redundancy, guess none.
For me cloud is elastic vps. You can scale up and scale down.
If you can't scale it, it's not cloud. It's normal vps.
Probably you mistook it with some managed service like firebase hosting, or bunny storage zone. Where your application is deployed around the globe and almost impossible to go down.
I think we are talking something on the os level here.
Where you can do apt get install nano on it.
I'd say another criteria for cloud is that all provisioning is abstracted to API calls and any customer can fully automate their deployment