The Best Grid/Cloud Hosting Providers For Your E-Commerce Business
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Grid or Cloud Hosting, is the newest hosting solution and is popular with web 2.0 websites and services (software as a Service aka SaaS). Cloud hosting combines features of distributed computing, peer-to-peer and virtualization to offer an on-demand computing via a network of computers (grid) working as one.
One major advantage of Cloud/grid hosting is its ability to scale, just by adding more hardware (servers) to the "grid", which it means that theoretically grid hosting can resolve many challenges associated with online services that have massive demands/users.
Cloud Hosting is an enterprise-class of web hosting which demands high availability and performance of the website/web srvices. Hence cloud hosting is suitable for applications such as SaaS (Software as a Service), Web2.0 services, Virtual datacenter.
We’ve gathered up 10 cloud/grid hosting solutions which best for your e-commerce business needs and would help you get started on your journey into the sky.
Amazon CloudFront – Cloud Hosting
When you combine CloudFront with S3, you get a repository for your original files, and CloudFront helps deliver your files from multiple edge locations so that your users get delivery with low latency and high data transfer speeds. Pricing is based on data transfer and GET requests.
Amazon EC2
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as Amazon EC2, allows you to launch and remove web servers as you need with the OS and configurations that you need. Pricing is based on the amount of computer time and bandwidth that you consume with no minimum monthly fees.
Amazon S3
Amazon Simple Storage Service, more commonly known as Amazon S3, has pretty much become the default file storage system for just about every major web application you can think of. As with other Amazon services, you pay only for the resources you consume based on storage, transfer and requests.
GoGrid
GoGrid offers you the ability to set up instant, on-demand servers with “control in the cloud” features. Both Windows and Linux based servers can be launched via the web interface in minutes via numerous offered server image configurations.
Google App Engine
App developers can host their applications on Google’s servers for free. If your app grows beyond the free quotas, you can pay for additional resources, but you only pay for what you actually consume. Python and Java are the only officially supported languages, but there are workarounds for apps programmed in PHP and other languages.
Elastic Server
With Elastic Server you can choose pre-existing packages to add to your servers, or you can upload your own and customize it to fit your needs.
FlexiScale
FlexiScale allows you to mix virtual and dedicated servers as you see fit, and you can launch as many virtual boxes as you like from the web control panel or via their API. Images include various flavors of Windows and Linux, offers up to 8 GB of RAM and new instances can be launched in under a minute. As with most cloud hosting options, you only pay for what you use with FlexiScale, and there is no contract minimum length.
GridLayer
GridLayer goes with a more traditional hosting price structure by offering up priced packages for its various solutions. As the name suggest, the company specializes in grid solutions for on-demand scaling as your service or application demands it.
Softlayer CloudLayer
CloudLayer from Softlayer allows you to deploy on-demand computing instances of various operating systems on a minimum of 2.0 GHz processor in as little as five minutes. You can integrate each instance with others, or you can run them as stand-alone instances. Pricing can be by the hour, or you can get a discount by paying for a month at a time.
The Rackspace Cloud
The Rackspace Cloud, formerly known as Mosso, has a three-step process to launch the servers you need: Choose RAM from 256 MB to 15.5 GB, choose your operating system and off you go to having a new server in just a few minutes. Pricing starts as low as $.015 an hour.
