Addressing the use of cloud computing for web hosting providers

Abstract

Nobody doubts about cloud computing is and will be a sea change for the Information Tech nology. Specifically, we address an application of this emerging paradigm into the web hosting providers. We create the Cloud Hosting Provider (CHP): a web hosting provider that uses the outsourcing technique in order to take advantage of cloud computing infrastructures (i.e. cloud-based outsourcing) for providing scalability and availability capabilities to the web applications deployed. Hence, the main goal is to maximize the revenue obtained by the provider through both the analysis of Service Level Agreements (SLA) and the application of economic functions. This target is achieved by using an SLA-aware resource (i.e. web servers) management. Through the experimentation we demonstrate that the CHP is able to maximize the hosting provider's revenue while offering to the web applications scalability, availability and very good performance.