Is Reseller Hosting a type of "Cloud" Hosting?

[The Expert]

Reading a few things on cloud hosting has me to believe that the basic idea is that the storage resources for your websites can be scaled up and down as needed easily because the files are spread across many different servers. As demand increases you just pay more and your storage space increases without having to move your (now bigger) site to a new server.

Is this what Reseller Hosting is? My reseller sites are all on my one reseller account but they have completely different IP addresses once set up.

[CDarklock]

What makes the cloud different is that your files are stored on multiple physical machines. Multihoming - one machine with several IP addresses - is pretty much the exact opposite of this.

[Aaron Moser]

No, a reseller account is different than cloud hosting. If you want cloud hosting then AmazonS3 is the way to go.

[jacktackett]

Basically cloud computing and reseller hosting are two different things.

Theoretically you could have a reseller account housed in a cloud infrastructure - but most hosting companies don't do this yet. They typically create a top level hosting account for you - the reseller. From this account you can then sell individual users their own hosting accounts, complete with their own control panel etc. Now some providers may have starting hosting the file systems - the disk space where your files are kept - on an internal cloud system. Some may have a backup system that's analagous to a cloud too.

Basically a "cloud" is an infrastructure where many users can consume services on demand. It started with bandwidth, then Disk space, but can now incorporate entire computers itself. So if you need 10 computing elements now - you can grow to 10, and when demand shrinks, you would go back to your minimum settings.

Please note-like all new acronyms - they are based on items from the past, oft times given new names with a few new features to help market/promote them. If you look at several articles in journals like Infoweek etc you'll find even the pros have a hard time agreeing on what the term 'cloud' really means.

Unless you're worried about redundancy, load balancing, or scaling quickly I would not worry too much about whether your reseller hosing account is in the 'cloud'.

The reality is most IMers just starting out can get by with shared hosting. If they become successful you'll typically find they progress to a virtual private server (VPS) or an entire dedicate server.

Later they may branch out into multiple servers to handle different activities like a application server, static content server, a database server with a backup server. Only a very few get to the point where they have to start worrying about load balanced services. I hope you eventually get to that level,

I've built out and ran several data centers so please feel free to drop me a note if you have any other questions.

best,
--Jack

[Eric Lorence]

Reseller hosting is nothing more glorified shared hosting on more "robust" servers, WHM panel access, but not "root" access.

In other words you may still be sharing the server with hundreds of other sites.

Cloud hosting has been explained above, but for a new webmaster a better upgrade would be a VPS, if dedicated is too pricey.

[TristanPerry]

Nope, they are completely different.

Reseller hosting is just shared hosting, with the ability to create your own accounts on the server. Hence you can reseller space.

Cloud computing refers to a scalable environment whereby resources (to a website or whatever) will vary depending on the demand.