The shared cloud is designed to provide individuals and small businesses that have fairly simple requirements with an affordable way in which they can enter the cloud. With the shared cloud you can specify the resources of your individual virtual machines so that each VM is designed to meet its usage precisely; the eNlight platform from ESDS encourages this by providing you with a control panel that allows you to specify precise resource units during the VM creation process so that you will only ever be paying for the resources that you want or are using and nothing more. Resource wastage can be a big issue for businesses when they have to choose pre-defined cloud hosting plans because more often than not there will be certain resources that they aren’t using to their full potential; for web hosting companies resource wastage can represent a failure to assist their customers in having their needs met in full and by offering to allow customers to choose what they’d like to see from their cloud virtual machines, hosting companies can guarantee that businesses have a platform on which their needs can be met in full.

Although the shared cloud hosts many users, most cloud platforms can guarantee up to 100% uptime because the design of the cloud ensures that hardware and network failure can’t impact on the performance or operation of the cloud as a whole. Even though individual servers in the cluster can fail, virtual machines are often hosted across several servers in the cloud so that additional resources can be located on other hosting nodes if one of the servers that a VM rely on crashes. Storage responsibilities are taken care of by central SAN (Storage Area Network) arrays to provide the highest level of data security possible and if any issues occur here, data is backed up across several hard drives so that data loss is pretty much impossible.

Using the ESDS eNlight platform as an example, you can expect to see the following benefits when using a shared cloud solution:

• If you are upgrading from a form of shared web hosting then you can expect to see a cloud virtual machine offer you an improved level of uptime as well as an improved web hosting environment that can offer a higher level of security
  
• Compared to a dedicated server, the shared cloud can offer you a more affordable web hosting experience that can meet your requirements in the same or similar ways
  
• You will have full root access to your virtual machine, but eNlight servers and resources can also be managed through our web-based control panel so that you can adjust the settings of your VMs on the move to ensure that they remain stable.

Private Cloud

Private clouds cost a lot to setup and run because of the amount of hardware that forms the basis of this environment and the manpower that is necessary to achieve this. Larger enterprises are the target audience for private cloud hosting because this is the only group that would be able to afford such a vast hosting infrastructure and at the same time only larger businesses with high volumes of customers will have the ability to make full use of what a private cloud is going to be able to offer them. ESDS can provide you with the full set of technologies required to run a private cloud, along with the support necessary to run the infrastructure; even though you may have your own IT support team, it will be more beneficial for your business to use ESDS for support of your private cloud because our staff have developed and have full knowledge of the workings of the eNlight platform.

The private cloud is designed to offer the following benefits to larger businesses:

• If you currently have a number of dedicated servers or servers that you host on-site then you can save money by consolidating them into virtual machines in your private cloud
• Complete control over the hosting servers and network infrastructure means that your private cloud can be altered to match the hosting requirements that your business needs to have met
  
• Additional capacity can be added to your private cloud when necessary without causing downtime to any of your services.

Cloud Hosting Comparison

The shared cloud and private cloud are aimed at two different audiences: shared cloud for small businesses, the private cloud for larger businesses. ESDS believes in offering a hosting service that can meet the needs of any users: individuals and businesses; the choice between the two different types of cloud is one that is going to be based on your needs and precise budget. If you are unsure of how eNlight cloud hosting either in a shared or private environment can benefit you, contact the 24×7 ESDS support team today for advice on what will suit your requirements best.