More is sometimes better than one. Instead of relying on one server for a website, Web hosting across multiple servers, in a clustered environment, can get you greater reliability, security and uptime.

Even compared to the finest dedicated server plans, a clustered approach to Web hosting can bring sites to greater heights, because it goes beyond the limits of one physical server. Clustered or grid Web hosting technology allows processing power to be shared across many servers, distributed in real-time. That means websites are powered by a virtually inexhaustible source, as even the largest customer can’t take up more than a fraction of the total server pool. It also means that if one server is ever under threat, many other servers are available to share the load or take over.

TopHosts spoke to leading Web host, Netfirms, which operates through a vast clustered environment. They host over 350,000 websites and serve over a million customers, all running on grid hosting technology made up of thousands of servers. Jason Matheson, Netfirms Product Manager, says his company firmly believes clustered hosting is the optimal solution for websites, superior to all other types of systems.

“Clustered hosting is better on all levels… It’s faster to develop on, it’s more reliable because there’s no single point of failure and it’s going to be up 100 per cent of the time. You’re not going to miss a beat,” Matheson said.

He says clustered hosting infrastructure supplies a level of service unrivalled by dedicated or other traditional solutions. All their plans, ranging from their basic $4.95/month to Enterprise packages at about $100/month, run on this technology, which distributes loads among multiple servers. Separate server grids are also tasked to HTML processing, database processing and file storage. This ability ensures consistent and reliable performance – something Netfirms customers demand, Matheson said.
When it comes to secure Web hosting, clustered also holds a significant edge over traditional architectures. Most importantly, when facing denial-of-service attacks (DoS) – hacker assaults designed to shut down or overwhelm servers through unwanted or malicious code – threats can be dispersed over a pool of servers. Because there’s no single point of failure in a clustered server system, individual hardware components affected by attacks won’t impede operations. Instead, Web hosting providers can simply take infected servers out of traffic handling during assaults.

Matheson also says clustered hosting allows for much faster and easier development among servers. When hosting providers need to change customer accounts, settings or resources, for example, those adjustments can be transmitted immediately to every server in the cluster. But with typical shared hosting architectures, changes to a configuration file become live only after individual servers reboot during off hours, or on a cyclic basis.

So, if clustered Web hosting provides faster performance, greater security and efficient programming capabilities, why isn’t it more widespread? According to Matheson, it’s simply harder to do.

“It’s (clustered Web hosting) not easy. It requires a highly skilled team of engineers. Second, it’s expensive and not something smaller hosts can afford to do,” he said. “But I think a lot of hosts grow into it eventually because they realize it’s the way to go.”

A true clustered system requires various server grids focused on specific functions. Netfirms maintains thousands of servers, arranged in grids for Web hosting, email, CGI processes, database processing, file storage and others. All that hardware equals a lot of resources, time and money.