Exponential growth has pushed technology into the lives of millions on a daily basis. This very high growth rate provides both benefits and challenges in developing and maintaining systems that can handle the highly interactive public. Cloud server hosting has been developed and tested over the last several years, with hopes and promises of a system that can provide unfettered service. For those less familiar with its design, the question of reliability is a big one.

Most people wonder how it works. Cloud hosting providers offer a networking environment that enhances hardware and network services by spreading the load over many servers instead of bogging one or two systems down. By dividing the system, the load and risk is spread over a global scale. If one system fails, others simply step in to pick up the load. This is essentially the next step above redundant systems. Except in this case, the systems are not just backups of each other. They actually work in tandem.

Dedicated servers were considered the top tier type of system. It was considered a status symbol to have your own dedicated server. This meant that you were no longer bound by limitations and could grow your systems as needed. Having many dedicated servers quickly became cost prohibitive. This provided a dangerous situation where a single system failure would take out a company’s websites completely.

Virtual private servers have long been the low end of the spectrum. The design is to provide a cost effective solution to get your website online. Through this type of system, you are sharing a single server with other web customers. The danger here lies in sharing the risk of someone installing a program that suddenly crashes the system. In this situation, many customers lose their websites until systems can be restored.

Some issues have been reported in the news. This is because one of the largest services had an outage that lasted a few hours. Just like any new system, the limits were tested. The nice thing is that lessons were learned. When compared to the number of customers served, it turns out this caused about one-hundredth of a percent of down time. With the millions of customers they serve on a daily basis, this is better than most services can boast.

The services continue to grow and improve. The single outage that happened a couple of years ago provided extremely valuable information. This has given the industry the test needed to make the improvements necessary to get to the point of serving so many customers without interruption. The ongoing improvements and successes has provided the evidence necessary to show its reliability. As prices come down, more companies are able to afford the service.

The largest web companies already use the technology. The worlds largest search engine and retailer have been using this type of system for several years. In fact, they depend on it to provide the load balancing needed to handle hundreds of millions of requests per month.

Cloud hosting has grown in popularity and reliability. As with any new technology, the first few years worked out many of the hurdles. Now, the technology has built a proven track record of reliability. As more companies come online, smaller businesses and even home consumers are beginning to enjoy the benefits of the low risk Internet technology.