Questions about Little Oak's cloud hosting have been pouring in ever since I mentioned it in yesterday's blog post. I'd like to address these questions in today's post with help from Brad, our senior systems administrator.

Q. What is cloud hosting?

A. Cloud hosting is a new technology that serves content from multiple servers at once. Little Oak's web servers are configured in a large load-balanced cluster. High traffic on one site does not affect any other site since the load is shared in the cloud. Each client's website is served from a minimum of a dozen web servers at any one time.


Q. Is Little Oak's cloud hosting safe?

A. Yes. Little Oak keeps all private information on secure servers off of the cloud.


Q. Is Little Oak's email on cloud hosting?

A. Little Oak runs a dedicated load-balanced cloud just for email services. The email cloud is kept separate from the web hosting cloud. We do this because email and web servers have very different goals: a web cloud is designed to make content public as quickly as possible, whereas an email cloud is designed to keep content private using tight security practices.


Q. My blog uses a MySQL database. How does Little Oak handle MySQL?

A. Little Oak uses a dedicated MySQL cluster with RAID10 Intel SSD (Solid State Drives) and a battery backed up RAID controller. The cluster uses a minimum of 24gb of ram on dual quad core hyperthreaded Intel Xeon processors.


Q. What's the advantage to me?

A. Minimal downtime, maximum speed and security. Most web hosts run all services (web server, email, MySQL) on a single machine which creates a single point of failure. With cloud hosting there is no single point of failure. If one machine goes offline it has no affect on your account.


Hopefully this answers most of your questions about cloud hosting. If you have any other questions, or you're interested in being hosted on the cloud, please contact me at sales@littleoak.net.