I went to GoDaddy.com for hosting. They have menus like 1)website hosting 2)grid hosting
what is the difference between the two. I am new to this hosting and webapps stuff..
+1
A:
Grid hosting usually means that the web space you rent is not located on one (potentially shared) machine, but is more like a "virtual machine" (think VMware) which is hosted on a cluster of servers (a grid).
While resources on a single machine are limited and might run out, especially if it's a shared host and you have to share your resources (memory, bandwidth) with potentially hundreds or thousands of other users who are hosted on the same machine as you, grid hosting is more flexible, as your virtual website could leverage resources from more machines in the cluster if necessary. This of course also increases reliability of the website, as the failure of one grid node doesn't matter, another server takes over, while the failure of your dedicated or shared host takes your website offline.
I would assume that they refer to the single machine as "website hosting".
Update
GoDaddy has an FAQ about their grid hosting, which should answer all additional questions you might have.
Christian Hang
2009-05-23 02:54:01
A:
From wikipedia: Grid Computing | Cloud Computing. I haven't seen 'grid hosting' as a common phrase, but it could be taken to mean using one of the earlier two concepts to host a website in a scalable manner.
However, if godaddy is offering 'grid hosting' I suspect they're offering to grid computing to you in such a way that has nothing to do with hosting a website. They're offering to sell you large amounts of processor power with low communication requirements, as opposed to selling you web hosting which is typically high communication requirements with low processing requirements (relative to one another of course)
Jherico
2009-05-23 02:54:15
A:
A reply from Godaddy Support:
Please be advised while there is unlimited compute cycles for site server and not for database.
Dnif
2010-02-24 11:30:29