"Cloud computing", "cloud hosting" and "grid hosting" have been particularly popular buzzwords for the last 12 months. It refers to computing capacity residing within a "cloud" of servers, available for a user to utilise at any time - scaling their requirements with demand, as they see fit. Popular implementations of "cloud" platforms include Amazon's EC2, GoGrid and Flexiscale amongst others. The scalability of these platforms allows organisations to alter their hosting solution as demand changes - for example if a company is running a particularly intensive marketing campaign, or if you're featured on a popular TV programme. On Dragon's Den, for example the website of the person pitching for investment invariably falls over for the duration of the show with the weight of thousands upon thousands hitting their site simultaneously. With "cloud" hosting, you can "provision" additional web servers and allocate additional resources as your needs change. No up-front capital investment. No wasted hardware sitting around idle for 90% of the time.

The problem with these implementations of cloud computing is that these products are comparitively inaccessible to an average end-user - requiring knowledge of how to deploy and configure virtual servers, as well as administer and security harden them. Rackspace's 'Mosso' platform attempted to resolve that issue. It gives a user an interface, analogous to standard shared hosting to Rackspace's cloud-infrastructure. Users just load up a website as they would with any other shared hosting platform using FTP and then they can get on with their business, without worrying about "deploying" new servers or configuring Apache or tweaking IIS; safe in the knowledge that their site will be reliably hosted by the cloud platform, and that in the even of any surge in traffic (perhaps featured on a popular website such as Digg or Slashdot) the platform their website is hosted on won't break a sweat and fall-over, like conventional website hosting which is typically limited by the resources of a single server.

The problem for a lot of people is that at $100 a month, the Mosso cloud platform is still out of their reach as a hosting solution. If you have a small personal blog which you use to write a few articles from time to time, are you going to spend $100 a month to keep it running in the event of a surge of traffic? Unlikely, for a lot of people (and fledgling businesses) have to prioritise their spending, especially in such economically turbulent times.

Tsohost have attempted to address this issue by launching a cloud hosting platform aimed at everyone. We've attempted to create a product that allows a user - any user; home, hobby, small businesses to have a hosting account hosted on a redundantly load-balanced cluster ("cloud") of servers that will scale with demand and remain lightning fast all the time. By taking this approach - anyone familiar with a standard shared hosting system can now take advantage of the power of the cloud, without any knowledge of server administration, nor with a big budget.

Taking more than 12 months of development and significant capital investment, this bespoke platform from a small, friendly web hosting provider is an exciting development from an industry that is increasingly becoming homogenised with generic cPanel based hosts offering exactly the same features for approximately the same price.

One of the first sites hosted on our new hosting platform was a charity website which was running a very large matched donation scheme. Being a charity and having a restrictive budget, their previous hosting solution stood no chance of standing up to the deluge of requests coming in to their website. By utilizing our new cloud hosting platform, they were able to take approximately £500,000 in donations in just 30 minutes through their website, without increasing their hosting budget, without significant capital investment and, as opposed to other utility computing platforms, without knowledge of server configuration, deployment or security. We hope this is the first of many success stories of smaller websites taking advantage of an advanced, load-balanced, clustered hosting platform without breaking the bank.

You can find find out more about Tsohost's clustered "cloud" hosting by clicking the link below...
Clustered Cloud Hosting from Tsohost