Grid Hosting

Grid hosting is a new term to me so I went to my favorite resource. According to Wikipedia Grid computing is an emerging computer model, which provides the ability to “perform higher throughput computing by taking advantage of many networked computers to model a virtual computer architecture that is able to distribute process execution across a parallel infrastructure”.

Grid hosting is a relatively new web hosting buzz. This form of distributed hosting is when a server cluster acts like a grid and is composed of multiple nodes. Being highly fault tolerant, this system is breaking new grounds when it comes to the network stability factor.

A Grid computer system uses the resources of many separate machines connected by a intranet or Internet network and offers the ability to perform computations on large data sets, by breaking them down into many smaller ones. It models a parallel division of labour between processes and enables the system to perform many more computations at once than would be possible on a single server.

Grid server environment does require a secure resource control, reliable network and service quality in order to be sustainable. A grid hosting model means that you have an independent, self-contained grid deployments run within isolated containers on shared resource provider sites. Websites and hosted grids interact via an underlying resource control plane to manage a dynamic binding of computational resources to containers.

The objective of the web hosts is to build server clusters and to bring the advantages of enterprise-level infrastructure to shared hosting services.

Until now, businesses, developers, resellers and individuals have been forced to rely on the specific, single server approach to hosting and all of its limitations. Complex, load-balanced hosting environments have only been available to those with the requisite IT budgets. The emergence of grid hosting has removed this barrier, bringing unsurpassed performance at a price point usually associated with single server environments. With grid architecture, servers become applications that are freed from their underlying hardware and able to harness the combined power of ALL hardware on the grid in a uniform, scalable and load-balanced environment.

"Anyone who has experienced data loss, extended downtime or service degradation can tell you about the limitations of traditional hosting technology," said Steve Harwood, president and CEO of NetLab. "NetLab was created in order to provide a next-generation solution to these and other drawbacks and do so in a way that is scalable and affordable for a wide range of users."

So what make grid hosting so special? What causes it to stand out in the outdated world of traditional shared hosting?

Well, first there is the high availability grid hosting provides as the virtualization and storage mirroring allows the grid to withstand multiple hardware failures with no impact on uptime or data integrity. Second, we have unlimited capacity as additional capacity can be added by simply adding more servers to the grid, thus eliminating performance bottlenecks common in single server hosting environments. Third, it provides scalability whereby users can scale from a fraction of a server up to a full server with on-demand burstable scaling. Lastly, it is vendor neutral. That means it is designed to be completely compatible with existing operating systems, middleware and Web applications. Billions of lines of tried and true infrastructure software, middleware and application code can be used unaltered.

Grid hosting is something we will all be encountering many times over in the years ahead. It is a definite part of our futures.