An interesting article written by Isabel Wang, The Future of Dedicated Servers, where she discussed whether the rise of Google and Microsoft Live and their abundant resources might make the dedicated server market obsolete, when people are switched to on-demand hosting.

As Google and Microsoft continue to invest in their Internet infrastructure, might they ever reach an economy of scale where it’d make sense to “lower the barrier of entry” by giving away not just APIs, but hosting resources on which third party developers could build and run complex, high traffic mashups?

Imagine this — instead of renting a $99/month Intel/AMD dedicated box, you rent CPU slices in Google’s 400,000+ cluster/server-farm, where it provides high availability (when was the last time you can’t access google.com?), great parallel computing technology and almost limitless bandwidth. Whether it runs single-threaded PHP script for your WordPress blog is another thing…

Well, I will not say that a big clustering account would replace the dedicated server market today, as there are many reasons people opt for dedicated servers. It is like reseller account verses virtual private server — those who picked reseller accounts for their bigger storage, more bandwidth, more CPU resource and an easy to use control panel so they can just focus on content creation. VPS customers (or when they graduated, dedicated server or co-location customers) want their root (or Administrator) access, flexibility of software installation, custom configuration etc.

Mosso is an interesting hosting product. 80Gb storage + 2Tb bandwidth. Moreover, it sits behind inside farm of application servers (PHP, ASP, JSP, MySQL, etc) behind a cluster of load balancer. 100% SLA on network and site availability. Redundant everything. You don’t know who serves your web page, just that it would be served by the cluster member with least load and fastest response time. Even if your neighbour gets slashdotted or digged, it is not going to affect your sites’ performance much. Great infrastructure for $100 a month.

It’s good for the host as well. Overselling CPU time is now closer to reality. I imagine the CPU utilisation would be much better distributed, if you have 500 websites over a 10 node cluster, than 500 websites over 10 dedicated servers.

Maybe in 3 years, all major shared hosting companies will operate this way. We’ll see.

However, it is also known that not all web applications work in cluster. What if the PHP app uses a different way to track sessions and cannot afford to have different requests served by different cluster node? How many support load balanced MySQL servers? However, when there’s demand, we’ll also see more web-based apps designed for this type of environment.

Also looking forward to have a cluster-ready Linux distribution for web hosting companies. Boot straight up from SAN, configured itself from the master nodes of the cluster, and read to serve requests. Hmmm.