Clustered Hosting

There are a lot of different hosting options out there to choose from. If you're just getting into the basics of website owning and operating, or are looking to switch to a different provider, one should weigh the benefits and disadvantages of the different methods of hosting.

For a long time, shared hosting was the way to go - it's still the most popular way to host websites. It's inexpensive, fairly reliable, and has the ability to host dozens of websites for one price. Unfortunately, it has some distinct disadvantages. Shared hosting can have periods of decreased performance and downtime due to its nature - shared means your website is on the same server as hundreds or thousands of others. As one can imagine, this provides for some occasional complications.

Clustered hosting is a newer, and more innovative hosting solution. One's websites are hosted across a broader range of interlinked servers, called "clusters". The distribution of the duties associated with hosting your site are spread across several servers in a highly fluid way. As one server becomes increasingly used, others step up. Due to how versatile this method of hosting is, performance and uptime are significantly higher than on shared hosting. Although slightly more expensive, clustered hosting is slowly taking more and more of shared hosting's marketshare.

Here's an awesome site for more on clustered hosting

Here's another article on the benefits of clustered hosting

Here's a third article about clustered hosting and windows, one of two popular operating systems used to run the servers.