subject: Examining The Trustworthiness Of The Cloud Server Solutions [print this page] Technology continues to grow and expand into the lives of most people on the planet. This extreme pace of growth has made it both more important and more difficult to maintain systems that are reliable enough to handle the increasing traffic. Cloud hosting is one of the latest technologies that have entered the scene with promises to provide a system that has zero down time and interruptions. The question on everyone's mind is if this can be possible. Compared to other available services, the system is more reliable by design.
A cloud hosting provider spreads the load over software and hardware systems. The design is such that a website is unaware of the hardware level. Specifically designed software platforms provide a disconnect from the hardware, allowing server failures that have no impact on the actual performance. Because the servers work with the platform in tandem, any one that is not able to carry the load is simply disregarded by the software. Other servers take up the slack, providing a much smoother customer experience.
Dedicated servers were considered the top tier type of system. It was considered a status symbol to have your own dedicated server. This meant that you were no longer bound by limitations and could grow your systems as needed. Having many dedicated servers quickly became cost prohibitive. This provided a dangerous situation where a single system failure would take out a company's websites completely.
Virtual private servers have long been the low end of the spectrum. The design is to provide a cost effective solution to get your website online. Through this type of system, you are sharing a single server with other web customers. The danger here lies in sharing the risk of someone installing a program that suddenly crashes the system. In this situation, many customers lose their websites until systems can be restored.
A large outage was reported in the past. The only reason it made headlines in the news was because of the large amount of service that was interrupted for the few hours of the interruption. The good thing about this event was that the company and industry learned technology lessons and have been able to improve the service even more. This amounted to about one hundredth of a percent of down time. There were no large reported interruptions before or since. Compared to other types of systems, it continues to prove to be an extremely reliable solution.
System reliability continues to improve. Though there isn't necessarily much room for improvement, the hosting companies continue to discover newer and better ways to improve how the systems provide reliability. As the systems become more popular, the prices drop. This is making it more affordable for the small and medium sized companies to begin using the technology.
The largest web companies already use the technology. The worlds largest search engine and retailer have been using this type of system for several years. In fact, they depend on it to provide the load balancing needed to handle hundreds of millions of requests per month.
Cloud hosting continues to grow in popularity. Though a single failure made headline news, the impressive note is the total silence heard since. The proven track record of the systems gives even the largest companies comfort in knowing they can handle almost any level of customer growth.
