What is Cloud Hosting, Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is hot. Early this year, PC World predicted that cloud computing would shape up as a big trend in 2009.Cloud computing is a type of on-demand hosting services on the internet. Not only a necessity for mainstream e-commerce sites, it also increases efficiency, is scalable, and lowers expenses. The monetary savings may be misleading to consumers and businesses who do not fully understand the potential risks involved.

With a pay-as-you-go type structure, users are only charged for the amount of traffic, bandwidth, and memory used. Online businesses become more efficient by only utilizing the storage and space needed, while also being assured capacity for any usage increases.

But what exactly is cloud computing and why does it matter?

Wikipedia defines cloud computing as “a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.”

Whatis says that cloud computing is different from traditional hosting in three ways:

1. It is sold on demand, typically by the hour (this is why cloud computing is often called utility computing)

2. A user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time

3. The service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a PC and Internet access).

Just imagine this: your organization has 1,000 boxes of documents to scan and OCR and you need to get the work done in one week. By hosting your application on the cloud, you could have as much processing power as you need. Hundreds of servers could be deployed to your project at once. When the work is done, your hosting obligations go to zero.

Or this: your organization issues a monthly report that is hugely popular. By hosting your site or report on the cloud, you can have as much bandwidth as you want during the one day a month when the report is in demand.
Be excited about cloud computing because it could level the playing field between the big and little guys. Small business will have the opportunity to do big things on infrastructure they no longer need to own. Check Out with HostSG.com for the most exciting plans and ready to build options.