Cloud hosting is a big deal - it's a revolution in hosting and in IT infrastructure more generally. Companies are switching over from physical infrastructure to cloud hosted environments in their droves, so much so that by 2012, business analysits IDC expect cloud computing to capture 25% of all IT spending. And it's easy to see why...

So just what is cloud hosting?

It all starts with the concept of "virtualisation". Virtualisation allows a single physical server to be partitioned into multiple "virtual servers", each given specific allocations of the server's memory, processing power and disk space. Because the resources are virtualised, it's possible to increase and decrease them on the fly - meaning you can scale up from a small virtualised environment to a larger one as your needs increase, or scale down should they decrease. Your costs are tied to your usage and you are not paying for server resources that you don't use, as could be the case on an underutilised dedicated server.

Cloud hosting takes this concept one step further. Multiple servers are connected together over a private gigabit speed network, and a grid operating system is installed on each of them which essentially binds them together. Not only do you now have the same ability to scale resources on demand, but you also have an in-built redundancy. Any data uploaded to a virtualised environment is 1:1 mirrored on a different physical server. Furthermore, the grid operating system reserves enough spare resources to withstand the failure of a physical server. In the event that a physical server fails, the data on it remains available and the resources are simply restarted elsewhere in the cloud. Best of all, this happens automatically, and takes just 3-5 minutes to complete.

The power of AppLogic

Our cloud hosting platform is powered by 3Tera® AppLogic™ technology. AppLogic not only allows us to build a highly redundant scalable environment. It allows us to design and build complex distributed hosting infrastructures that would once have taken weeks, in just a matter of hours. Environments with multiple load balanced web servers, replicated database servers, firewalls and more, can all be tested, monitored and perfected at a fraction of the cost of doing so with physical hardware. For customers with very particular redundancy requirements, our engineering team can even mitigate the 3-5 minute automatic failover period, by the design of the particular environment. Ask us for details.

For customers with in-house technical teams, with our 'Virtual Colo' service, we can provision access to a visual editor where you can create your N-tier environments yourself in your own private cloud. Create, modify and scale your environment on demand - all remotely via an easy to use drag-and-drop web interface. Contact us for more information.

"Create, modify and scale your environment on demand - all remotely via an easy to use drag-and-drop web interface."