Advantages and Disadvantages of Clustered Website Hosting

Clustered website hosting is a form of websites hosting where the different services for a website are balanced across a number of servers, meaning that if one server in the cluster happens to fail then there are a large number of other servers in the same cluster that are able to replace the role of the server that has crashed or failed; this means that a websites and any services related to it such as email and DNS will always be available, since each service is either mirrored or backed up onto several servers as to ensue maximum uptime and reliability to prevent any websites or services that are being hosted in the cluster to fail or crash, since this could have a negative impact on the website or business that is using website hosting within the cluster concerned.

Clustered website hosting is a form of web hosting that is seen to be more suited towards businesses and websites that are resource intensive but require a high amount of uptime since their website is their business, and is most cases mission critical to them meaning that if their website was to become unavailable for even a short amount of time, they would still lose trade; if a business loses trade because its website is down, it might have to consider moving to another host since downtime to any business could potentially mean a great loss of money, in turn damaging them financially - it is for this reason that many choose clustered website hosting, since the reliability of it is much greater than that of standard shared website hosting or even specially designed business hosting packages.

If you run a business whether it be online or on a high street, you should always consider clustered website hosting for your needs if you are looking for that extra bit of reliability to ensure that your website is always available for yourself and for those who might require access to it at any time of the day; this is also more important if you use your business website to sell your products online, since if your website becomes unavailable and people want to your products from your website, they will be unable to - if the goods that they are after are easily available elsewhere, they might go elsewhere meaning that you could lose customers and it could also give others such as prospective customers a bad idea of your business if your website’s isn’t available.

You should always ensure that you choose a popular Clustered website hosting provider with a good reputation, since at the end of the day it is easy for anyone to create a web hosting package and claim that it is ‘clustered‘, since a majority of server clusters utilize internal servers meaning that most of the time IP addresses are being shared and the internal servers aren’t accessible externally; this means that you should always read the reviews that are contained on website hosting review sites regarding clustered web hosts that you are interested in using, since at the end of the day you want to ensure that you choose a clustered website hosting provider who is truly using clustered hosting technologies within their hosting environments to ensure that the platforms that clients are hosted on are indeed clustered. By using a clustered web host, you are able to ensure that any part or service related to your website will always be available as to enable you to ensure that that you are always able to receive email, and that visitors and servers are able to navigate to your website via the means of DNS with ease; this also means that you are able to ensure that your website will always be available to the general public so that people who want to purchase a product from your website, or want to just find general information about your business from your website or may need to contact you, then they will be able to without facing any problems such as downtime on your behalf.

So, if you need to ensure that any service related to your website such as the email and the DNS always needs to be available, and that the website itself always needs to be available so that customers and visitors are able to purchase products from your website or just so they are able to view it.

Advantages of Clustered Website Hosting

For some, especially large businesses who need maximum reliability for their website, clustered website hosting will bring many advantage since it will mean that the most important aspects of their domain and website such as the DNS, email and the website itself will always be available for use, since all the services will be spread across a server cluster meaning that if one server in the cluster fails, the affect on the website and other services will minimal if anything; with other types of web hosting, namely shared website hosting, the reliability of Clustered website hosting is not achievable since in most cases one server is used to host all the services related to any single website.

Reliability

As mentioned previously, clustered website hosting is able to provide both individuals and businesses with a new level of website reliability which wasn’t previously possible with other types of website hosting including shared website hosting, VPS hosting as well as dedicated server hosting; this is because in all of the aforementioned scenarios, one server was used to serve all the services for all the websites that the server hosted, meaning that it took just a small spike from one running process to take down the whole server or to kill off certain instances of the service concerned.

All the services for all the websites that are hosted within a clustered website hosting environment are spread across a number of servers, meaning that at any one time there is always more than one server that is able to process a request from any one service, allowing for fast responses to almost any request which is almost non-existent with other types of web hosting; this also means that if one server within the cluster fails, there is a number of other servers that are available to take up the roll of the server that has crashed - this means that downtime is almost an impossible thing to consider within a clustered website hosting environment, since only something major such as a power failure in which the back up electrics systems didn’t kick in could affect a clustered web hosting environment.

Reliability is one factor that is important to both individuals and businesses, since if a website is unavailable or another service such as email or DNS is down, then the affect that it might have can be inconvenient; for example, if a website is unavailable then visitors or customers won’t be able to access it meaning that if it is a business website that you are hosting, customers might not be able to purchase products from your website, and if the mail service is down on the server on which you are hosted, you won’t be able to send or receive any email under the domain concerned.

With a Clustered website hosting environment, you are also able to ensure that your website will load fast and any server requests that you do make will be responded to by the server almost automatically, since there are multiple servers or nodes within the cluster that are available to take the load of any requests that are made by yourself or anyone who is hosted in the same cluster as you; with regular website hosting, there is only one node available that is able to take the load of any requests that are made to it - this means that if there are too many requests made, the server will end up crashing - this type of scenario could be classed as a ‘DDOS‘ attack on the hosting server concerned.

The chances of your website being taken down for over usage of server resources is also one thing that is highly unlikely within a clustered hosting environment, for the main reason that there are the resources of many servers available for your use. Also, the chances of your website being taken down because of a malicious attack such as a DDOS attack are also reduced, since there any many servers within the cluster that are able to take the strain of the attack meaning that the attack would have to be pretty heavy in order to take down an entire clustered hosting setup.

Multiple Servers

The main advantage of being within a clustered website hosting environment is that there are multiple servers that are able to take the load and strain of your website, meaning that the threat of downtime because of an overloaded server is almost nil since the servers within a clustered environment are normally of high specification, and are designed to take the load of several different services at once as to ensure maximum uptime for you.

In a standard shared website hosting environment, there is only one server and the resources of one server available to take the load of all the services that the server has to host as well as all the websites that are hosted on it, meaning that a high CPU load is a common occurrence within a shared website hosting environment as well as the server itself running short of physical memory to use; this means that a shared hosting server crashing is a common occurrence, however in a clustered website hosting environment there are multiple high specification servers in most cases that are able to take the load of all the websites hosted within the cluster.

Although it is said that either VPS hosting or dedicated server hosting is the right kind of hosting for people who are hosting resource intensive websites, clustered website hosting should also be a considered alternative since there are many more resources to go about meaning that the affect which a resource intensive website is able to have on other websites that are hosted within the cluster is minimal; however, it might still be possible for poorly coded websites to have an affect on an entire cluster, meaning that in this situation your clustered website hosting provider might ask you to move to a different host which might cause you inconvenience if you have to transfer all the data that you are hosting over to a new web host. In some cases, services within a clustered hosting environment are ‘load balanced‘ meaning that the load of each service is spread across a number of different servers that are dedicated to running that service only; however, in other situations you might find that the servers within the cluster that you are hosted have been setup in a way which means that if the ‘master’ server fails, a second ’slave’ server comes into force meaning that no downtime will be experienced, although the services within the environment are not clustered - this type of website hosting solution is commonly known in the industry as a ‘failover‘ setup.

The fact that a clustered website hosting setup utilize multiple servers is one reason why many people who are streaming media from their websites, whether it be live or download, are choosing clustered website hosting in order to host their websites so that visitors are able to access their multimedia content as well as their website in general; this is because the multi-server setup is able to take the extra strain that streaming media puts on a standard stand alone server hosting setup - in a standard shared hosting environment, most people who were using or were wanting to use their account to stream media or allow visitors to download multimedia content would be asked by their provider to find another host, because of the strain that both put on the server as well as bandwidth.

Disadvantages of Clustered Website Hosting

Although clustered website hosting might appear to bring people who are after a reliable web hosting service and those who have resource intensive websites advantages, for those with smaller websites which don’t receive that many visitors, clustered website hosting might prove to be a disadvantage for them; at the end of the day, when considering website hosting solutions, you should always take into consideration both the advantages and disadvantages of any form of web hosting.

Cost

In some cases, clustered website hosting services can be prove to be pretty expensive when compared to other forms of website hosting, meaning that for those who after reliability on a small budget, clustered website hosting might not be the right type of website hosting for you and your website; in this case you should consider a lower end shared website hosting package or a lower end reseller hosting package since these might be able to meet your needs with ease.

The main reason that clustered hosting services are generally more expensive than other forms of hosting is because of the number of servers that are involved in keeping the cluster up and running, and these servers require a lot of time and money in order to ensure that they carry on running with ease, to ensure that the cluster itself is running with ease and isn’t affected by any sort of downtime; however, this also means that you are ensured a high level of uptime if not 100%, and you should also be able to receive a high level of support from the web host from which you have taken out your clustered website hosting plan.

However, for large businesses and individuals who require a high level of uptime and reliability for their website so that they are able to trade with ease by selling goods online, the high cost of clustered website can be easily justified since they are able to claw back any money spent on website hosting from any revenue that they bring in from their website which they are hosting within their clustered website hosting account; this means that if you are running a website that you are using to sell goods on, you should consider clustered website hosting if you are currently on a standard shared website hosting package since you will be able to greatly improve the reliability of your website and any services related to it both for yourself and any visitors that your website might receive at either day or night.

Overselling

In some cases, you might find that your clustered website hosting account has been assigned rediculously high amount of certain resources - this practice is known within the web hosting industry as ‘overselling‘, since resources are being sold that don’t even physically exist on the server or cluster in which the website hosting account will be created, since in reality you will probably never use all the resources that you have assigned to your clustered website hosting account.

Overselling is one thing that can draw many people into clustered website hosting, whether they have the need for that extra reliability or not, since by getting all the extra resources which aren’t available with lower end website hosting packages, they think that they are getting more value for money than they would be with any other form of hosting; this means that overselling is one factor that is able to bring those who have the ability to abuse the hosting platform on which they are situated, which in turn means that in some cases they do have the ability to abuse the hosting cluster in which their account has been created - although not entirely possible, in some cases this is able to have an affect on the other sites that are hosted within the hosting cluster.

Overselling is only a practice which is common in shared website hosting and among hosts who are after the biggest number of customers and domains possible, and are offering rediculous offers such as 100GB disk space for a stupid price of $1 - most people ignore the stupidity and the fact that this is almost impossible since they are always after value for money; it is because of this that you should try and find a clustered web host that provides you with a reasonable amount of disk space and bandwidth that you can actually use and is reserved for use by your account only within the clustered website hosting environment.

If you have a clustered website hosting account that has unlimited or resources which goes into the 100’s of GBs or even TBs, then you should consider moving to another web host that is not overselling its web hosting services; this is because the affects of overselling could easily impact the performance of your website as well as other websites that are hosted in the same cluster as yours - and low performance and reliability is not something that you want since you could lose customers, in the case that you are running and online shop.

Conclusion

In conclusion, clustered website hosting is the right form of web hosting for you if you need that extra reliability that isn’t found with other forms of website hosting, for any reason such as the hosting environment in which your account is hosted is shared with other people or that you don’t have the budget to cover a dedicated server which might be able to meet the same criteria and reliability as a clustered website hosting environment would.

However, the reliability of clustered website hosting can come at a cost, since the cost of clustered website hosting is in most cases higher than that of other forms of web hosting, meaning that if you have a small budget and are after the reliability that is provided by clustered website hosting you will not be able to find a solution that will suit your needs - if you are after clustered website hosting in particular then you should try and increase your budget to cover the cost of clustered website hosting; if you are unable to increase your budget, then you should consider a higher range shared website hosting package or a lower range reseller hosting package since both of these should be able to more than fulfill your needs and should give you the room to expand which you might need for the future without the need to upgrade your web hosting package. So, if you are after reliability and in some cases value for money then you should consider clustered website hosting for your needs.