Why Application Hosting is Useful?
Before going on with the discussion of the usefulness of application hosting it is imperative to know what application hosting is all about. Suppose you have taken hosting package from a service provider. Now you have outsourced the creation of your web page to a designer house. However, you need some addition to the basic site design. For example, adding emails, SSL security, Shopping Cart, etc. What will you do?
When the web evolved HTML or Hyper Text Mark up Language was the way to go. Client and server communicated with each other through browsers and the language used was HTML. With time however more and more languages evolved, targeting the web only. If we take the example of Java, Java Script, XML, XHTML, DHTML, PHP, ASP we will know about the progress. The list can be pretty big if we start explaining what all these languages do. However, the dedicated hosting package and the server need to support the languages and the applications based on those languages. For example, if you are on Windows Hosting package you cannot use applications based on Linux Operating System using PHP.
If we continue to monitor the development of XML then we will find that the World Wide Web Consortium has recognized XML as a free open standard API. W3C is now a standard for cross browsers to follow to display web content correctly. So, web and grid hosting service providers need to support the various levels of application hosting to keep the business of their clients afloat.