TechNayak(mirror)

(mt) Media Temple – (gs) Grid-Server : Details

There is some relief in the hosting world with the introduction of grid computing hosting. For the uninformed web hosting comes in two flavors – shared and private. Private hosting(Expensive) is when you have control of your own server and the server is dedicated to your application. Shared hosting on the other hand, is when you have hosted on a  server shared by many other applications. Typically many users host applications on shared logins of a single server. Mostly shared hosting is the viable option with low costs and supported technologies, but the elemental flaw with these are that, you may end up on a server who hosts a resource hog. A resource hog is a site that uses most of the resources on a server like cpu, bandwidth etc, since there is no easy way of controlling these factors hosting companies strive to maintain a balance of resource hogs and other sites. The other sites hosted on such servers tend be really slow and deteriorate as the load on the resource hog increases.

The solution to such problems to virtualise the server and switch between servers when the load is high, such virtualisation comes at a big price and can be implemented only in limited cases. The other option is to provide grid computing and that concept is what is seeign the light of the day.  Medai temple has started offering Grid Server hosting for as low as $20 a month. My hosts are also beta testing virtual private hosting which is another concept in itself where the user feels he/she has complete control on the server which is virtualised and a simple load balancer takes care of peak loads on applications. These technologies must become a regular offering in web hosting as time progresses