Shared Grid Hosting
Grid hosting seems to be the buzz term in the web hosting industry
. Everyone seems to be interested in grid hosting of some sort. Customers are trying to get the most out of their web hosting packages and are prepared to do whatever it takes to do just this.
Looking at shared hosting in some detail will reveal a lot of its fundamental flaws.
The concept of putting a few hundred customers on one server with essentially no hard limits besides space and bandwidth is a prelude to disaster. One faulty script can allow a spammer to gain access and crash an entire server. The server will crash because of one user's carelessness and a spammer's cunningness. There is no shortage of careless customers or cunning spammers. When that one account causes the server to go down, every other customer is inconvenienced because their site goes down too.
That one careless customer makes the host's job a lot harder too. They have to deal with another hundred clients yelling at them while they try to fix the problem. The other hundred customers call and email the host and overload the support. The problems escalate and, eventually, the hosts are constantly bombarded with similar issues that cause their overall service level to deteriorate.
The issues do not even have to be because of a single careless user. In fact, they can be caused by quite the opposite. When a blog post, web page, or photo happens to make it to the front page of digg or reddit, it can get tens of thousands of unique visitors. This surge in traffic is enough to crash many servers. Again, the one user is mad because their site is down (despite their hard work) and every other user is mad because their site is down as well (and they did not do anything different).
When the server goes down, so do all of the accounts' email, databases, and files. There is a single point of failure that causes the server to go from fully functioning to nearly or completely useless. That point of failure is not hard to achieve, as hosts see day in and day out. Scalability among shared hosting accounts for anything besides space and bandwidth is limited at best. Customers get more and more frustrated with shared hosting as their sites grow.
That certainly does not make for a sustainable model from either the customer or a host's perspective. Eventually, people will get frustrated to a point where they cannot take it anymore. Some customers will move to VPS hosting, where they share other server resources with just a few clients. Many customers pick a dedicated hosting plan, where only they can bring their server down. Others pick grid hosting, where the "power of the grid" helps keep their site up and working under even the most strenuous conditions.
Put simply, shared hosting is sub-par when it comes to performance, reliability and uptime. The model is not effective for mission critical web sites.
What about some of the other potential issues? Space and features seem to be two ever-increasing concerns among hosting customers. Shared hosting as a model depends on overselling, and as customers actually begin to use their space (which is still rather statistically unlikely, but happening more and more frequently), hard drives fill up.
The features of shared hosting are limited to what will work for everyone. You may want a special software configuration, but if that will somehow (even potentially) negatively affect other customers, it cannot be installed. Other solutions (notably dedicated servers) allow basically unlimited configurations and customizations.
It seems to be increasingly apparent that as the need for web sites evolve (which is happening fairly quickly), shared hosting becomes more and more obsolete. It is hard to predict what the web hosting industry will look like in five or ten years, but it is safe to say that it will look very different.
by: joseph06
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