Advocates of grid hosting technology say the practice of clustering multiple networked servers is a more cost-effective and practical method for hosting, though some critics point to technical problems that may limit its effectiveness at the moment.
 
There is no denying, however, that grid hosting has seen a boom in popularity in the past year. From Media Temple, to Amazon's S3 storage service - and a collection of other new providers - grid-based utility-model hosting providers have carved out a new niche in the Web hosting market.

Part of the responsibility for that new niche belongs to 3Tera (3tera.com), which launched its AppLogic grid operating system this year, significantly lowering the bar for Web hosts to offer services based on clustered machines, converting commodity servers into scalable shared grids that are easy to manage.

The solution, designed to help service providers meet the needs of small and medium-sized businesses, enables existing software to be packaged into completely self-contained, portable applications that can be easily deployed and scaled to dozens of servers on demand on any AppLogic grid.

Using this technology, Web hosting providers can offer Web 2.0 and SaaS companies the foundation to deploy scalable Web applications without owning and operating the hardware infrastructure. And unlike a dedicated hosting offering, a utility hosting service only requires the customer to pay for the resources they use - a considerable boon to developers delivering their applications SaaS-style.

Bert Armijo, vice president of marketing for 3Tera, believes that grid technology is not only a cost-effective and practical solution, but also enables Web hosts to tap into an entirely new market.

"The benefit to the hosting provider is that [grid technology] allows them to bring out new services that attract customer bases that were not able to use hosting before," says Armijo. "We successfully helped several companies move from colocation to hosting by being able to use grid technology, which allows them to customize the infrastructure necessary for the applications without having to use dedicated hardware to do it."

When Web host Layered Technologies (layeredtechnologies.com) first deployed 3Tera's AppLogic, the company worked with 3Tera's technology team to adapt certain items to what Layered Technologies CTO Jeremy Suo-Anttila refers to as the "LT way of doing business."

Suo-Anttila says AppLogic and new internal procedures now enable the company to eliminate, pre-build and automate many of the same steps it previously performed on a dedicated hosting server.

"AppLogic enables users to easily deploy existing Web applications on a grid and scale them with little or no modification, and without requiring a SAN or other shared storage," says Suo-Anttila. "By completely separating software from the hardware infrastructure traditionally needed to run it, AppLogic is enabling the first true utility services to be offered."

There are other tools a Web host can use to assemble a grid-based platform for providing Web hosting - most notably Sun's (sun.com) Grid Compute Utility. The company offers grid-designed hardware and its N1 System Manager platform that can be used to assemble utility computing grids. Other Web hosting companies, like Mosso (mosso.com) have designed their own utility computing platforms. But so far, the list of technologies is short, with AppLogic looking like the most easily implemented.

Grid technology is not without its drawbacks. Both Armijo and Suo-Anttila admit that there are initial obstacles to overcome whenever a company implements new software technology.

"Certainly this is a little bit more complicated technology than merely putting up dedicated servers, so it does require a certain amount of technical capabilities," says Armijo. "We find that most hosting providers have the capabilities to do so, but there are some that for whom this is going to be a little more complex than the hosting software that they're using today."

Suo-Anttila adds that implementing a grid operating system can be somewhat of a challenge for certain Web hosting providers, since the technology involves an aggregation of servers and networking, and not just a single server.

"As with any new software technology, there are issues that arise that need resolution," says Suo-Anttila. "The long term value of what grid technology offers diminishes all drawbacks."