Glossary
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting runs your site across a pool of virtual servers that scale on demand, billed by usage for elasticity and high availability.
Cloud hosting runs websites and applications across a pool of interconnected virtual servers drawn from large clusters of physical hardware, rather than on a single fixed machine.
Defining traits
- Elasticity — resources scale up or down on demand to match traffic.
- High availability — if one node fails, others take over; data is replicated.
- Usage-based billing — you pay for what you consume.
- Traffic is often distributed by a
load-balanceracross many instances.
How it differs
Unlike a fixed vps or dedicated-server, capacity is not pinned to one box, so sudden spikes (helped further by a cdn) are absorbed by adding instances.
Why it matters for hosting
Cloud hosting suits variable or fast-growing workloads where predictability of scale matters more than a flat monthly price. Because instances come and go, the serving ip-address and even the datacenter can change over time.
See also
VPS (Virtual Private Server)
A VPS is a virtual machine with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and disk carved from a physical server, giving root access and isolation at modest cost.
Dedicated Server
A dedicated server is an entire physical machine rented by one customer, delivering maximum performance, isolation, and control.
Load Balancer
A load balancer distributes incoming traffic across multiple servers to improve capacity, reliability, and uptime for a website or application.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN is a worldwide network of edge servers that cache and serve your site close to visitors, cutting latency and absorbing traffic spikes.