Clustered hosting is technology that has been designed to eliminate the problems inherent with typical shared hosting infrastructures. This technology provides customers with a “clustered” handling of security, load balancing, and necessary website resources. A clustered hosting platform is data-driven, which means that no human interaction is needed to provision a new account to the platform.
Clustered hosting "virtualizes" the resources beyond the limits of one physical server, and as a result, a website is not limited to one server. They share the processing power of many servers and their applications are distributed in real-time. This means that they can purchase as much computing power as they want from a virtually inexhaustible source, since even the largest customer never consumes more than a fraction of a percent of the total server pool. Customer account changes (to add new resources or change settings) are propagated immediately to every server in the cluster. This is different from typical shared hosting that usually require a change to a configuration file that becomes live after the server is rebooted during off hours, or are pushed on a cyclic basis every few hours.
Security is a fundamental feature of clustered hosting, not an afterthought. There are multiple tiers of security protections, including intelligent routing, redundant switching fabric, and built in firewall and proxy technology, are integrated into the clustered hosting platform. Clustered hosting protects against both internal attacks common to shared platforms, as well as denial of service and other external types of attacks targeting Web servers.
In a typical hosting environment, the security layer is usually not integrated in the platform. The stock solutions used for shared hosting do not solve core issues around integrating security between the application and the operating system. At best, most typical hosts will implement a firewall solution, and weaknesses inherent with the operating system will remain exploitable to those that penetrate the firewall.
Clustered hosting network layer protections employ intelligent routing, redundant switching fabric and built in firewall and proxy technology. Clustered hosting provides considerable advantages over traditional hosting architectures in mitigating denial-of-service attacks and other network attacks because such attacks can be dispersed over a large pool of servers, and if individual hardware components are impacted by such attacks, they automatically fall out of traffic handling during the attack.
Clustered hosting also places controls and protections on scripts. A poorly written script can cripple a server; while clustered hosting secures and assigns script processes to individual accounts by isolating script processes with our patented ‘Virtual Domain Environment’, so a script with loops and critical flaws will only impact the performance of the site it is included on.
Traffic is dynamically load-balanced across many Web servers using clustered hosting as well, so the impact of an increased load is diluted. Additional servers can be added to the cluster with no impact on active customers. Clustering ensures that Web servers are available to handle huge spikes in traffic.
There are definite benefits to using cluster hosting. Most clients see higher level performance as the virtually inexhaustible resources of clustered hosting provides a greater computing capacity than when you share these resources and a server may become overloaded with accounts. Reliability is increased as your site will never be affected by other sites on the same server. We’ve already discussed the much added security you receive with this plan ad one you control access to you account. Finally, for most, the clustered hosting plan provides the benefits of a dedicated server at more affordable prices, often not much more that shared hosting costs.
Basically, I sum up Cluster hosting as a plan that offers multiple servers hosting the same content for the purpose of better resource utilization. I recognize that this is not a type of hosting that the average small business will need but that I’m sure my banking institution utilizes. I won’t even begin to try to explain this all in laymen’s terms because I can’t. Most of what I have learned about this type of hosting I learned at From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. If you need the technical details, I’ll refer you to them.
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