Cloud hosting has become more popular and utilized by more major companies over the last few years, which has spurred development and brought the price down to where more small time developers can afford to make use of this new technology. Now we are even seeing cloud reseller programs available, which brings more questions than it does solutions.

All cloud hosting is not the same. In the beginning, larger companies would offer cloud instances for sale. This is essentially a VPS or multiple VPS’s ( oversimplified but basically true ) acting as one server with pooled resources. By having a large network of servers, even hardware failure would be quickly compensated for as another server would take over. This was typically billed at an hourly rate, since the cloud is likely not going to be used 24/7. This was advantageous to businesses who needed powerful server applications to manage day to day activities.

With the advent of Cloud Linux, even smaller web hosting companies can offer cloud based services. This allows them to deliver virtual servers with 16 cores and 24GB of ram and even more. The cost is kept down since it is spread over a number of servers, and possibly even datacenters. With this being possible, the average user will have to do more research before getting in the “cloud”. I personally know of one company which bills it’s product as cloud based, yet only utilizes 3 cores with 4GB of RAM. A set up like this can be easily lagged with a few heavy users, yet they are perfectly justified in billing the service as cloud hosting.

The moral of this article is that just because a hosting company offers cloud services, this does not mean that your website will be available with 100% up-time at lightning fast speeds. As always, you get what you pay for. Do your homework and check reviews, it is really the only way to know for sure.

The Digicracka is a freelance blogger who specializes in web development.