evolution of hosting – grid computing
OK so you’re a hotshot and you want to do it right. Your site rocks and you think it’s gonna be huge!
Grid computing gives you the reassurance that when your site is digg’ed you can automatically use a share of the resources from all the machines on the grid. Similarly in the case of a hardware issue, an automatic failover can save your butt by having the HTTP requests routed to the next box. Sweet huh?
From what I’ve seen, the hosts offering this service tend to let you install and run pretty much what you want (within reason) as was the case with the dedicated server we covered in the previous post. Compare this to the dedicated server and you may find the advantages very appealing indeed! They both offer you plenty of storage and bandwidth, grid accounts a bit less perhaps, but you get the scalability that can be oh so hard to get when you’re running on one physical server. In the Digg scenario, there’s not much time to react, let alone try to get another machine running and partition your app to run on two boxes instead of one.
And you can always check the WhoIs for more info. I read the other day in the current domain name registration guide lines that domains cannot be less the 3 characters? Well how does w3.org work then? It never really occurred to me. I mean “whois.org” is 5 characters; “dyndns.com” is 6 characters…Anyone unconfused me?