I had an e-mail the other day from somebody wanting to know what clustered hosting was all about.  The technology and idea behind clustered hosting was to eliminate some of the problems customers have with today’s usual shared hosting setup with the servers.  The idea of “clustering” comes in with how it handles the security, resources, and load balancing.

Performance of Clustered Hosting

You use the power of many, for one.  Clustered hosting “virtualizes” the resources beyond the limits of one physical server, and as a result, your web site is not limited to one server.  The work your web site does, and any strain it might cause to a single server would be distributed in real time.  To translate that, you know all of those “unlimited” offers you see with some web hosts?

Well with clustered hosting – that might actually be true.

Poorly-written scripts will not hurt neighboring accounts either.  Troublemakers are isolated, monitored and restricted to the account’s available CPU cycles.  So if Billy down the block is getting his web site dugg by digg, it will not take down your web site hosted on the same server.

Redundancy, Control and Price

In the redundancy department, all functions failover because all the servers serve all the functions out there.  Services are not local to a server, so loss of a server is not fatal to the overall service.

On the web hosts’ side, accounts should be provisioned in real time depending on the resources that account needs.  Also server admins have one single login where they can go in and control the clustered hosting when needed.  Like editing databases, changing DNS and other server side duties.

For the end user, cluster hosting should be pretty cheap.  I would say somewhere between a regular shared hosting plan and a Virtual Private Server (VPS) in price should be about right.