NORMAL WEB HOSTING: Website hosted on single server

a. In traditional web hosting in addition to writing actual code developer has following responsibilities:

• Setting up the application server (e.g. Apache).

• Set up MySQL database.

• Setting up runtime platform like PHP, Ruby, etc.

• Set up FTP to deploy your IDE.

• Set up security and firewall.

b. Plus, if you want your application to be reliable, scalable and resilient against various failures, you’ll have to deal with additional issues like setting up, monitoring, alerting load balancers, replication of application across multiple servers, deployment scripts, etc.

c. Thus, developers waste their time in setting up the production environment and managing servers.

d. E.g. DreamHost, Host Gator, GoDaddy.

PAAS HOSTING: website hosted on multiple servers at same time.

a. Here core competency of developer is to write the code and not to manage the servers.

b. It provides following benefits:

• No setup or configuration of servers.

• Easily deploy your application.

• Easily scale up or scale down your application.

• Redundancy, failover, backups are built into the system end to end. DNS, load balancers, caching server, application server and the database all run on multiple servers in different availability zones such that if failures occur there will be no or little downtime.

c. E.g. PHP Fog, AppFog.