Clouds. Everyone is talking about cloud computing these days. But what does that mean?
Well, with traditional hosting, you have a server (souped up PC) connected to a large Internet connection, which you upload your files and programs to. When a user visits your site, their request travels over that large Internet connection to your server and your server responds with the page or data requested.
So what happens when that server crashes? Every computer crashes at some point right. If it happens to your server your customers don’t see your website, or their data, they see nothing. Which makes you look stupid.
So here comes the cloud. Imagine a lot of servers all connected together, connected to a lot of different, industrial strength, Internet connections. All those servers work together. If one server crashes — even if four servers crash — your customers still get their data and you still look good.
There’s another huge benefit from the cloud… Scalability. If you grow out of your traditional server, you have to add disks, buy more memory, then you have to take down the server to install the upgrades.
Not a problem with the cloud. Since your data and website is in the cloud, all the resources of the cloud are instantly available to you. So when that article you wrote on “Physics and Rock ‘n Roll” gets major attention, the cloud instantly handles the 26,789 hits per hour on your blog.