Grid hosting is one of those words like “the cloud” but many do not know what it is exactly. Here is a brief explanation of grid hosting and why it matters to you. You may have heard the term elastic scalability which means you can have more power when you need it. Imagine if you were working on your computer and all the sudden it began to slow down. You know the feeling when you realize it is about to crash or come to a halt, so you frantically close all your documents and hope you can beat it to the punch. Now if you had the ability to simply obtain more memory, or whatever it is you need, at a moments notice and only use what you need at that moment to assure no crash – that is tapping into the grid.

So imagine if your website has 10 people show up a day, and then 100, then thousands. The server you are on cannot handle it, meaning it cannot serve up the pages, images, and keep up with the database requests. This may happen for two reasons. First, the server may not be powerful enough for the number of requests. Second, the site may not be architected for that volume. In other words you may need multiple servers, to split out your database, to optimize pages for less database calls, etc. In the mean time while you figure that out it would be great if your site does not fail.

Trust me, I have spent too many sleepless nights at startups due to sites going down. For many reasons, some times they cannot scale, sometimes the resources are not enough. With grid hosting you can take care of one of the issues, the lack of resources will not be an issue.

Take a look at the beta grid hosting provided by GoDaddy. You can use a godaddy promo code while you are at it. By the way Go Daddy was recently named the Best Registrar in the annual survey held by Domain Name Wire.