Clustered Hosting Solutions

It seems like 2007 is going to be year when web hosters move en-masse to virtualizating their shared-server. In the past, virtual hosting is simply the practice of hosting lots of websites on a single box, and a web hoster may run tens of boxes.

With clustered hosting, every website is served by every box, using a fast SAN. This means that for shared-nothing applications like PHP, your website is able to take on bursts of traffic without everybody else on your box suffering from a “bad neighbour” effect. 10 years ago, one only has to worry about slashdotting. However, with social media on the rise, websites are just so much more susceptible to traffic surges.

Offerings:

• ElasticLive Xen + Amazon EC Clustered Hosting
• Amazon EC2 - strictly not managed hosting. This is really DIY
• LayeredTech Grid Layer
• Hosting Zoom Clustered Web Hosting CPanel (Actually it’s more like failover than grid)
• Concentric clustered hosting
• Netfirms
• Cartika Hosting Interesting – will dynamically move to dedicated server when there is a traffic burst
• DataReturn
• Mosso
• Media Temple has some solutions which support clustering for Ruby On Rails, which means processes have to be provisioned on boxes

Please leave a comment if you are aware of other hosters. Thanks.

Platforms: AppLogic Amazon EC2
Source: Netcraft – Price Competition in Grid Hosting