Cartika CEO Andrew Rouchotas says the new offering is the company's official entry into cloud hosting, a market that is currently made up of such competitors as Media Temple, Mosso, and 3tera's AppLogic.

HAL by Cartika (www.cartikahosting.com/hal) offers a range of high availability clustered web hosting solutions, along with a simplified web interface and customer assistance. The solution offers a range of features, including a redundant clustered architecture with additional load balancing of all services within the cluster.

In the press release, Cartika says that the HAL solution "resolves most common issues associated with shared hosting" through the Pressure Release System. The feature spreads loads over multiple nodes to allow websites to burst well beyond normal CPU and RAM allocations without overloading servers.

"HAL solves the problems typically associated with shared hosting by spreading services and loads across a fleet of load balanced nodes," says Rouchotas. "We are able to dramatically increase the resource availability and capacity to any given website hosted. Additionally, we are able to increase reliability by building physical server redundancy into all services."

The company adds that the service is "more reliable, as a downed server node will not impact service availability."

HAL plans include multiple domain hosting, Roundcube webmail, security firewalls, predictive failure analysis, load balanced architecture, redundant storage arrays, continuous data protection, integrated Mailfoundry anti-virus and anti-spam protection.

But perhaps the greatest 'selling point' for the scalable solution is the "pay for what you use, when you use it" pricing model, says Rouchotas.