Off late, people have started noticing the advantages of it. This technology cost less best to my knowledge and the results are not bad either. This is the reason behind the popularity actually.

Speaking of InformationWeek, their Sept 7 2009 edition covers cloud information well. Very much worth the read.

Yep - I have that sitting here beside me. I don't know how they produce a magazine every week, but they do - and in the door it comes Even Costco magazine featured an article on Cloud in their latest edition.

I've been experimenting a little with some cloud instances, but our target market (small-medium businesses) don't seem to want to spend the $1000+ per month on a cloud setup to take care of everything. It always amazes me how a multi-million dollar only ONLY company wants to spend $4-600/month on a dedicated server with a single point of failure rather than into a clustered or multi-homed server. The Cloud, in that regard, is the way to go. When you need to roll out extra processors etc to take care of a planned spike in usage, having a prepackaged instance ready to launch is very handy. But again, it costs money for the infrastructure that many just don't want to pay. And with PCI Compliance, PA-DSS and the various SAQ levels people need to comply with for July 2010, I wonder just how well the cloud will fair in a small business market.

It's the technology and demand of the market (example, for optimisation of resources and cost effectiveness) that accelerate the implementation of the cloud computing concepts.

It is a new technology. No wonder why it suddenly gain popularity. But practically I think it is not an affordable solutions. In some cases vps or dedicated hosting is much more affordable.

My head is in the cloud. Its the future of hosting, its just a move on from SaaS.

yeh i agree, cloud hosting is just an advance from where we were, my partner in carbon neutral hosting already runs one successfull web hosting business that uses older methods and servers etc, carbon neutral is all based on the clloud and i guess there is plus and negetive points to both but at the end of the day its just a step forward isnt it,,

People also need to understand the public / private cloud. For example, moving to a cloud for $30 month is in effect still shared hosting - there are many other sites & users on the same san / network (public). You could be sharing the disk I/O etc with maybe a gazillion of other people.

The real benefit is in a private cloud, where your company is utilising your own network of servers / san etc for only your OWN (and your clients) benefit.

I'm going to speak on this based the fact I have given the past year of my life to Cloud based hosting.

"Cloud Servers" or Cloud VPS as we call it. In a typical VPS solution you purchase a virtual machine that runs on a server with many more virtual machines. In a true cloud enviroment your VM (instance) is launched in the cloud. Sure, your instance might be running on a servers resources but the cloud knows what your instance is using and accomodates for it. What if the physical machine hosting your VPS has a kernal panic on the host? The cloud sees this and migrates you to other servers in the cloud.

That is the difference between a VPS and a cloud based VPS (or server) .. One might argue that is nothing more than "motioning" or "migrating" the server to another server. This is true unless the virtual server is running across all of the servers in the cloud to begin with. Which to be a true cloud this would be happening.

Cloud Based Hosting:

I read a user earlier compare clould hosting to clustered and load balanced hosting. They are nowhere in the same arena. Personally, my design was to launch multiple instances on to a cloud that are auto scaling and load balanced. They are looking to one central location for the content to serve. As a customers demands increase along with other customers the instances "scale up" across the cloud. In a typical clustered enviroment you have physical servers that can only do so much processing in a certain amount of time. Eventually enough customer load will saturate them.

In a true cloud there should be enough underlying infrasturcture to handle it. Even then there will be a maximum but additional servers should be added to the cloud before that happens.

I think this is enough for some more discussion to ensue. Flame away.

Brandon

The funny thing is the fact that Cloud Computing is nothing new, it's just a buz phrase.

I see a lot of people who think that virtualization is a cloud computing. Although the abstraction of computer resources is a part of cloud computing I would say that clustered, grid and cloud systems can be created and run successfully on physical machines only. Of course a virtualized infrastructure is easy to scale out.

Cloud servers are definitely HUGE right now, and definitely the way to go.

I mean, if you really look at the breakdown of cloud hosting, why wouldn't you want to go that way?

Well, maybe price? What's a side-by-side price comparison to a dedicated Dual Xeon CPU 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM and 2TB of bandwidth, or similar? Pick any provider.

Most hosting company provide cloud hosting already, if not said on the website just ask them