Clustered Hosting- A web hosting

Clustered hosting is the way of hosting your website. Cluster is a group of servers or computers, whose combined computational power provides a service.

Clustered hosting involves spreading the website across multiple servers. In the CatN stack each layer does its own individual task, so one for databases, one for logging, one for web etc. It has one main advantage, if one server goes down the others would not.

On a traditional hosting server, all  the data is stored and run on one layer, the main server. If this  server goes breaks, goes down or just stops working then all of your website goes down along with it. Nothing will work or displays. By separating hosting services across a cluster this can be prevented.

An obvious advantage to clustering is the even distribution of traffic across several servers. A single server will go down due to overload. Database activity is isolated from the web traffic, so an increase in database computation has less effect on static content form a web server, also web traffic for dynamic content will have little effect on database performance.

This separation prevents errors on one section of the cluster from preventing other services. If an entire database service fails, visitors to your website will still see the static and dynamic content.

But they will be unable to access the databases. You can use this to your advantage by displaying a notice letting them know that the database server is not functioning and to be patient while its being fixed. You can imagine, this is a lot more informative than them seeing a 404 because the whole site has gone down from one error.

However, this separation is not infallible. If the front-end layer goes down, then no user info can be displayed. It is not good to the end user just having the database and back-end working when there is nothing to interact with it. Fortunately the clustered platform lends itself to stability with multiple nodes (servers) in each layer picking up the strain if single nodes fail. New nodes can replace failed units with no interruption to the service of your website.

In the CatN stack traffic is directed to the correct server using load balancing pairs and the .craccess and .htaccess files. The load balance pairs between service layers ensures even distribution of traffic, and the .craccess and .htaccess files enable requests to be passed between the static and dynamic layers in the stack.

So the low down on clustered hosting. A cluster is the group of servers thatmake up the website. Every server has a dedicated job – database, web, email etc. If one server goes down, the others don’t go down with it. This hosting is a step forward into raising usability and isolating irritating down time.