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Grid Hosting
Grid, utility, cloud, cluster, on-demand, whatever you want to call it grid hosting has shown that it can pack serious power for the avid Web developer.
The concept of grid hosting is not new. In fact, the Internet is based on a form of grid computing. When the Internet first started it was a prototype "network" with military applications. The theory was if one node was destroyed the others would carry the information and allow the military to have seamless information flow regardless of whether the main headquarters was destroyed.
Many supercomputers build over the years use this concept as well. 200 normal computers strung together can equal the power of one super computer (just an example not a true figure) and most likely cost less to build and maintain. The SETI program has used a form of grid hosting since 1999.
As far as web hosting goes, grid hosting takes an entire datacenter and hooks up every computer as a sort of grid (not unlike a city’s power grid, hence the name grid hosting). Resources (processing power, memory, disk space, etc) is then take from this pool and given to each customer. If one computer fails in the grid the other computers pick up the slack dynamically. If your web site is on a computer that fails, you site will drop for a brief moment and come back online with little to no loss of data.
The average data backup service copies your data. When you need to restore you must install the software packages then use various utilities to get your databases back online and copy your web site files over. With grid hosting you can take a snapshot of everything you have, data, config files, etc. and if you need to restore it everything gets restored without having to do things in stages.
When you use grid hosting you have a pool of resources you take from the main pool and these can be used how you like. You can use these resources how you see fit and depending on how large of a resource pool and any extra hardware offerings (firewalls, etc) you have purchased you can build your private “data center” for the purpose of reselling, running projects, or researching updates to your main site. Grid hosting excels at offering flexibility to the customer.
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