The term "cloud" has become highly present in the web hostings market during recent times. Making something available or putting something "in the cloud" is a major trend. So what is the fuzz all about?

There are several distinct differences between web hostings and cloud computing. In a clouded environment the web hosting provider maintains greater control, but given the elasticity of a virtualized environment the server is much more capable of meeting rapid influxes in traffic than it would be in a regular hosting scenario. That elasticity amounts for one of the most advantageous benefits of a clustered hosting environment. Previously a rapid influx in traffic had the potential to crowd a server to the point of failure, making it a distinct possibility that the website would crash.

Cloud computing, or cluster hosting as it is more commonly being referred to enables a single server to be virtually divided into a multitude of individual virtual servers. Data or information stored on each clouded server can be backed up with greater CPU power than would have been available by conventional means.

Cluster hosting works by taking advantage of the virtually connected servers to meet the fluctuating demands of the websites housed on the server. Overcrowding is unlikely to become a problem in a clouded environment, since there is little chance that each website on the server will experience high traffic simultaneously.

The advantages are pretty straight forward. You (your application or website) is hosted on a big server farm, where each server is performing a special task and being a backup or fallback for other machines in the farm. Your web application can use resources across the various machines, hence making it extremely simple to host many services on one big server farm (cloud). The biggest advantage for you as a user is the (almost) unlimited scalability your application can achieve within the cloud. By adding further resources to the cloud, the provider can deal with an increase in resource usage by the users, thus giving the users the ability to grow their projects within the same environment, without having to switch product or provider every time they reach a certain size, disc space or bandwidth.

Some of the most common problems associated with web hosting(especially the top web hosts) can be mitigated by electing to deploy a cluster hosting solution. Not only does it provide the confidence that comes with knowing that a website will receive optimal uptime and resiliency it also enables webmasters to take advantage of the power, space and security of the websites of their peers since everyone shares the process and features virtually – while still having their own personal server allocation.

the top ten web hosts list some web hostings providers which supports cluster hosting.