Advantages of Cloud Hosting Over Remote Hosting

Cloud service providers offer a number of advantages over and above those provided by remote hosting Some vendors, such as Rackspace, offer both, so a look at their offerings makes clear the incremental benefits of cloud hosting:

� Scalability (also called elasticity), the ability to provision one or more servers quickly and to scale up or down quickly

� Pre-configured operating system images, such as a variety of popular Linux distributions: Ubuntu, Debian, Novell (SUSE), Gentoo, Centos, Fedora, Arch, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and various version of Windows-based servers.

� Virtual servers or physical servers that can be sized to different plans through a control panel, all the way up to 15.5 GB of RAM; servers can be configured with one to four processors and with one to four cores per processor, and disk drives are usually arranged in a fault-tolerant RAID configuration

� Dedicated IP addresses for cloud servers

� Communication among servers in the same cloud (co-located), effectuated at high-speed and free of communications charges

� Replication and/or distribution over various geographical areas

� Persistence provided by a separate cloud storage facility, as storage in a virtual cloud server is not persistent when the server instance is shut down

Source of Information :  Implementing and Developing Cloud Computing Applications 2011