Clustered hosting is a type of

web hosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing web ho ...

that spreads the load of hosting across multiple physical machines, or

node In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics * Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph *Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, lines ...

, increasing availability and decreasing the chances of one service (e.g.,

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

) affecting another (e.g.,

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

). Many large websites run on clustered hosting solutions, for example, large discussion forums will tend to run using multiple front-end webservers with multiple back-end database servers. Typically, most hosting infrastructures are based on the paradigm of using a single physical machine to host multiple hosted services, including web, database, email, FTP and others. A single physical machine is not only a

single point of failure A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system that would Cascading failure, stop the entire system from working if it were to fail. The term single point of failure implies that there is not a backup or redundant option that would enab ...

, but also has finite capacity for traffic, that in practice can be troublesome for a busy website or for a website that is experiencing transient bursts in traffic. Clustered hosting, also known as cluster server or cluster webservers, is more than just a buzzword; it is an essential component of web infrastructure that supports the flawless operation of many online platforms By clustering services across multiple hardware machines and using load balancing, single points of failure can be eliminated, increasing availability of a website and other web services beyond that of ordinary single server hosting. A single server can require periodic reboots for software upgrades and the like, whereas in a clustered platform you can stagger the restarts such that the service is still available whilst still upgrading all necessary machines in the cluster. Clustered hosting is similar to cloud hosting, in that the resources of many machines are available for a website to utilize on demand, making scalability a large advantage to a clustered hosting solution.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Clustered Hosting Web hosting

See also

References