Cloud hosting in a nutshell

Video Transcript

I'll tell a bit of an anecdote so you can see where this concept of cloud came from. The way the internet used to work and still does is you connect to the internet as a user and on the other side of the internet somewhere there's a server, and if you send something from one place to another, or between two people, lets say an email from one person to another. You have the email on your computer, you connect to the internet, you send that email off and then it arrives on the other side.

Now what happens in the middle? what the internet does is it breaks down that email into multiple different packets, mulitple different components and they get sent across to the other side. They get re-combined on the other side and the user finds that.

Now, unlike a train where all the packets might be on a single track going from point to point the internet is more like a road network say, so all the packets go on different tracks and they go all over the internet and at any one point in time while that email is in the internet as it were you don't know where it is, you don't know which computer on the internet between the start and end point is hosting which packet. And that's generally where the cloud concept came from.

So, network engineers would draw these diagrams where you connect to the internet, there's this big fluffy cloud in the middle. You send your email into that cloud, you don't know where it is in the cloud and it pops out at the other end and gets re-combined.

Cloud is generally a way of describing, not knowing which specific machine is doing something, or which specific machine is holding content. Cloud computing is doing computing tasks on a machine out there but not really knowing which computer is doing that computing task.

And cloud hosting is a similar concept. It's essentially your website, if it's a web hosting service you're talking about and it's saying your website is hosted on a machine somewhere, but you don't know which machine, you can't identify which machine and you can't ever identify if it's a single machine. It might be multiple machines.

Now, Netregistry's cloud hosting has been in development since 2000, we're actually one of the very first companies globally really that implemented the cloud hosting solution.

And the way that it works is that your website when you host with Netregistry is effectively hosted on not just a single computer, but on an entire bank, a cluster of computers. A cluster of web hosting computers. So the concept of which computer is hosting my website doesn't really apply, it's what is the cloud service that's hosting my website.