I've noticed that a few hosting companies are now advertising that they have "dedicated cloud" solutions. That's an interesting bit of marketing. A dedicated cloud, as I understand it (and confirmed by details on competitor sites) is basically a webfarm front-end with possibly a database cluster on the backend (though often the term "cloud" is targeted toward the front-end solution).

Either these companies are new to the webfarm / cloud space, or they're just putting a marketing twist on existing services.

At ORCS Web we have been hosting highly-available and highly-scalable webfarm solutions for clients for over ten years. Here's a short case-study about a webfarm solution we manage for Lake Quincy Media. We also host webfarm / cloud solutions for http://www.asp.net/, http://www.zagat.com/, http://aspalliance.com/, and many other clients.

I guess I need to start getting comfrotable with using the term cloud now since it seems to be the new buzzword. Whether you call it a cloud, webfarm, server farm, or anything else - I'm all for HA/HS solutions and believe that anyone who relies heavily on their web site/application being online should go this route. It's the best way to avoid costly downtime that might otherwise occur with hardware failure or resource overload.

Happy Hosting!

~Brad