We at Blackfoot are pleased to unveil our new Cloud infrastructure - The culmination of many months of work and investment, this will allow us to offer greater flexibility in the service we provide as well as increased performance and reliability.

An important question that’s asked a lot is what exactly is Cloud hosting? Unfortunately there’s no simple answer and if you ask 10 providers you’re liable to receive 10 different answers. Fundamentally however Cloud hosting is the combination of virtual resources to host services that can use part or all of a physical servers available computing power, and clustered servers so that the virtual services being provided can be run from any physical server in the cluster. Essentially this takes the traditional VPS service (where a user purchases a virtual server which shares a portion of physical hardware’s resources) and spreads it across hardware so that a single piece of hardware failing (which is unfortunately a fact of life in the computing world) doesn’t render services running on it unusable.

This provides all sorts of boring technical benefits (along with a few interesting challenges for us geeks) but what it boils down to is where’s the benefit for you the user?

One word: Reliability.

It’s that simple - At Blackfoot we try to keep everything as simple as possible (it’s our motto after all!), so you may not even notice when your website is seamlessly migrated to the Cloud, but once your website is on the Cloud it will simply run better than ever before.

We like to feel we already provide a pretty reliable service, but we also know there’s no such thing as too reliable - We won’t be making exaggerated claims about our Cloud platform providing superhuman infallible service as computer equipment does break and things do go wrong (even Amazon had to truck in lorry-loads of extra gear to a datacentre in Ireland in the middle of the night recently after an entire building full of their cloud servers went offline following multiple power problems!) but our new Cloud infrastructure adds several layers of robustness over our existing service to make problems which affect you, the customer, even more rare than currently.

As an added benefit to our VPS customers, the migration to our Cloud platform removes the current differentiation between guaranteed and burstable memory allocations - Once migrated to the Cloud, your VPS will retain the same amount of total memory as currently but this will all be guaranteed, and so always available to your VPS to use.