What Is Clustered Hosting?

On traditional hosting server, all services are hosted and run in a single physical machine, including of web, database, email, FTP and others. Any service failure could affect one another, even break down the entire server operation.

Clustered hosting is a type of hosting that spreads the content and load of hosting across multiple servers to do different jobs, i.e. to make your website (and other hosted services) perform better, faster, always available while minimize the chance of single point failure.

What Are The Benefits Of Clustered Hosting?

High Availability With Server Redundancy

In regular hosting, your website and services are hosted on one server. In the event of server failure, you will face inconvenience such as your customers not able to view your website. And if email service is down, you will not be able to send or receive emails under the hosted domain.

In clustered hosting environment, your website and services are hosted on more than one server to provide redundancy. If a server within the cluster crashes, the other available servers will take up the role of the server that has crashed.

Prevent Resource Overloading With Load Balancing

Instead of hosting on a single server to process all requests, you can distribute the workload across multiple servers in a cluster to maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overload.

For example, when visitors make requests to load your website, the load balancer will distribute the processing burden evenly or in some cases unevenly (in scenarios which servers are not of equal computing power) to all the web servers. Thus no single server is handling 100% of the web traffic, which failing could end up causing server overloading.

The chances of your website being taken down because of a malicious attack such as a DDOS attack are also reduced because there are many servers within the cluster which are able to take the strain of the attack together.

Improved Performance With “Servers Teamwork”

You get more powerful processing resources by integrating multiple processors and memory module integrated as an interlinked resource pool that shared across your cluster. Your websites are not served by a single server, but multiple optimized servers that result in lightning-fast website loading speed.

If many visitors are viewing your website simultaneously, the load balancer will distribute the traffic to the available servers so that they work together to deliver the images, scripts and page content to your visitors in parallel.

Secured Data Protection With Safe Storage

Your back-end data (database) server is connected to the front-end web server, not directly to the Internet. The data is isolated and kept safe from malicious access. The security of your cluster can also be further strengthened with firewalls within layers.

Whenever the web server needs to provide the info for a visitor request, it locates the database and retrieves the exact pieces of data for the visitor.

Customized Hosting With Great Scalability

You have the flexibility to configure the number of web servers, mail servers, database servers, load balancers, firewall switches, devices and the structure in your cluster to best suit your requirements.

Whenever you need higher resource for a specific service, you can easily add more servers to the cluster which spreads the work around, ensuring degradation of service will not happen. Clustered hosting is perfect for those needing greater flexibility and room to expand.

Single Server Hosting Vs Clustered Hosting

Single Server Hosting
A single server takes the entire burden to handle all services (web, email, database, DNS etc).
Single-point failure happens when hardware failure or server crash.
No stand by server to operate when a server failure happens.
All website contents & applications served by a single server.
100% of requests are processed by a single server.
Databases are stored in the same web server that is more vulnerable to malicious access.
Limited firewall protection.
Lengthy email queuing occurs when sending massive number of emails.
More vulnerable to DDOS attack.
Downtime happens during hardware maintenance and repair.
Can only scale up (Adding more CPUs or memory to a single server)

Clustered Hosting
Services are specifically spread across multiple servers in a well-organized structure, making them easier to be managed, maintained and protected.
No single-point failure risk.
Stand by server always available to continue functioning when failure happens.
Website contents & applications served by multiple servers in parallel action for faster delivery.
Requests are prioritized and distributed to multiple servers intelligently to speed up the response time.
Databases are securely stored in the back-end server and well protected from direct access.
More firewalls can be set up within cluster layers for better security.
Email queue is distributed to multiple mail servers to noticeably reduce the email processing time.
Smart load balancing to multiple servers reduce the chance of DDOS to crash your websites or applications.
Stand by server still continue functioning during hardware maintenance and repair.
Flexible to scale up (Add more CPUs and memory to a single server) and scale out (Add more servers to a cluster)