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What is the cloud?

What is the cloud.. 

There are many different definitions and descriptions for the term cloud. The Netsonic cloud hosting service is a transparent IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) type of platform. This is a managed, highly resilient hardware platform where your virtual private servers run. It is not a SaaS (Software As A Service) type of platform like Gmail or Salesforce.com where the applications you use run over a load-sharing cloud architecture where many servers operate together to provide various services.
 
With IaaS cloud hosting services that we provide, you get the benefit of on-demand server creation via a web-based portal, on-demand scalability and high uptime as a result of unique failover (self-healing) features cloud computing offers. 

Hardware: We use Dell dual Xeon 2.4GHz 8-core hypervisor servers (the hardware your virtual server runs on) with relatively small amounts of memory (16GB) which prevents us from overselling resources. Because of this, we are able to provide a very high quality of service as we cannot pack (oversell) the hypervisors and exhaust the resources unfairly. 

What about maintenance on these hypervisors? We can perform our normal maintenance at any time without interrupting your service. When we need to reboot a hypervisor or upgrade software, we simply migrate your virtual server to another hypervisor "hot", or while it is running. This means your server continues to run even while it is migrated to a different physical server within the cloud. If your cloud hosting provider cannot do that, they are not hosting your servers on a cloud infrastructure.
 
Your servers can run any operating system that we currently support (Linux variants and Windows) and are completely unique within the cloud. It is your server with guaranteed disk, CPU and memory resources. Everything runs like a traditional virtual private server and is nearly identical to a dedicated server. Simply put, the IaaS type of cloud we maintain is a highly available hardware infrastructure providing self-healing features to your virtual servers which result in the best uptime for you and your customers. This is why you need the cloud if you desire high uptime and massive flexibility over your servers.
 

High availability, self-healing & automatic failover 

 
Netsonic cloud hosting features extremely robust failover mechanisms, with intelligent monitoring of cloud services and nodes, and automatic service restoration in case of failure. If a hypervisor fails, the system will automatically relocate its virtual machines and reroute application data in 2-3 minutes (this includes failure detection, rerouting and boot time). You can also enable automatic periodic data backup, as well as emergency backup, as part of a disaster recovery system.

Our Dell Westmere-class Intel Xeon 2.4GHz 8-core hypervisor servers use SSD (solid state) drives to help reduce potential downtime and virtual server rerouting due to the most commonly failure prone component - the spinning hard drive. These SSD drives only run the hypervisor and do not house any virtual server data. 
 
Our SANs also feature hybrid SSD caching which moves frequently accessed data to a series of high performance Intel® X25-E SSD drives for blazing fast access during peak usage. This is especially useful for high volume sites such as blogs, forums or busy ecommerce sites. In aggregate, these features ensure system reliability and enterprise-class resilience and performance for your hosting needs.


Please note, Netsonic cloud instances are persistent and not ephemeral, meaning you do not lose data when the machine is shut down.


Achieving high uptime is not a trivial feat, but in our virtual server cluster (the precursor to our cloud), we have many virtual servers with 520+ days of uptime. This is what we are working toward in our cloud hosting platform as well. You can be assured we will work hard to provide the best possible platform for your hosting needs.