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 we ...
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 data ...
or
email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...
) affecting another (e.g.,
MySQL
MySQL () is an 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 relational database ...
). 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, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. SPOFs are undesirable in any system with a goal of high availability or reliability, be it a business practice, software appl ...
, 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.
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
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...
, 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.
See also
*
High-availability cluster
High-availability clusters (also known as HA clusters, fail-over clusters) are groups of computers that support server applications that can be reliably utilized with a minimum amount of down-time. They operate by using high availability softwa ...
References
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Web hosting