For many years webmasters had two basic choices when it came time to get their sites online. They could take their chances with a shared hosting arrangement and hope that the shared server would have sufficient resources available to keep their site up and running, or they could pay the exorbitant costs associated with a dedicated web hosting server.

Neither solution was ideal. Those who opted for shared web hosting were often frustrated by slow speeds and excessive downtime. Those who paid for dedicated web hosting often found that they were paying for lots of resources they did need, resulting in wasted money and wasted capacity.

The Era of Grid Hosting

Today webmasters have a third option for getting their sites online. Grid hosting combines the capacity of many different web servers, often 100 servers or more, to provide on demand power to websites as their demands increase. This solution offers all the capacity of dedicated web hosting with the cost effectiveness of a shared hosting arrangement.

Grid hosting can be a particularly good choice for webmasters whose sites go through period of heavy use, followed by periods of relative inactivity. Such sites often have trouble with shared hosting, since the shared web host may not have enough capacity for those spikes in usage. But paying for a dedicated web server can be a waste when the demand goes back to normal levels. With grid hosting additional resources can be allocated to each site as the number of hits the site receives begins to climb.

With grid hosting, hundreds of small virtual machines can be used to share and provision resources. This keeps the initial cost of hosting a site very low, while allowing webmasters to ramp up to a more robust set of resources as their needs change.

Many webmasters love the flexibility inherent in the grid hosting model. When the initial set of system resources begins to prove insufficient to handle increases in site traffic, the grid hosting company can simply flip a switch and allocate additional resources to the site. No physical migration is necessary and no new hardware platform is required. The site simply continues to function as it always does, only with additional capacity and more robust capabilities.

So if you have been looking for a third way, one that combines the power and flexibility of a dedicated web server with the simplicity and low cost of a shared hosting arrangement, grid hosting may be just what you have been looking for. Why not join thousands of satisfied webmasters and see what grid hosting can do for your company and your future success?