What is Clustered Web Hosting?

There are many different types of web hosting, but one that is not well-known is clustered hosting. This unique form of web hosting differs from the shared and dedicated web hosting, most notably in the fact that it spreads the hosting of websites across several machines. The reason it does this is that it can decrease the chances of one service of the web hosting from affecting another. An example of this is if you have your FTP, e-mail and website all on one server, and that server goes down, you lose all your capabilities. However, if they are spread over three servers, and the website server goes down, your customers and employees can still contact you through e-mail and access files on the FTP server.

Large websites that get a great deal of traffic or have a lot of users will use clustered web hosting so that they can run at peak efficiency and not worry about one server cutting them off from the world.

Another plus of clustered web hosting is that with hosting off a single server, there is only a certain amount of bandwidth available for the website, database, e-mail, FTP and whatever else is included. This can be a problem if a website is especially busy. By spreading out all the services of the web host to several servers, there is a great deal more space available on each server to handle the website traffic.


The problem when everything is on one server is that there is a single point of failure. If that server goes down, everything goes down. It is like old Christmas lights that would all go off if one light didn’t work based on how they were made. By balancing the load with cluster hosting there is no single point of failure, and that helps to keep your website running even if your e-mail is down.

Many larger companies are looking to clustered web hosting as a way to handle a great deal of their traffic and website solutions. With several servers devoted to them, they can be confident knowing that the likelihood of everything going down is very remote. In a way, these companies are choosing not to put all their eggs in one basket, choosing instead to spread them out. That way, if one thing goes down, they don’t all go down and the business can keep making money while one server is repaired.