It sounds like someone took the name "
load balancing" and started calling it "clusters" or "cloud computing".
Load balancing has been around for at least a decade. It was taught years ago in some of the advanced microsoft server certification classes. One of the classes I took touched on the topic, but did not get into the details of how to set the servers up for load balancing.
I see no reason to invent different names for the same thing. Load balancing - cluster - cloud computing - all the same thing. And its been around for years.
Load balancing is needed when the program can no longer run on a single server. So you lease two servers and balance the load between them. Even though some people say cloud computing might be cheaper, I bet your going to get around the same performance as from a dedicated or a VPS. Thats because the price of the server is the same. Dell is not going to sell a server "just" for load balancing. They are the same servers, same amount of websites, same basic cost to the hosting provider, just the load is balanced between the servers.
Then there is the security issues. If you have a cloud of 10 servers and 100 websites. If one server is compromised, then there is a good chance that all of the other servers can be compromised as well. Instead of 1 server and 10 sites being affected, you have 10 servers and 100 websites affected.
And then there is the private network issues. From what I understand, each server that is being balanced has to have 2 network cards in it. One card for the public to talk to the server, and another network card for the servers to talk to each other. This keeps the load balancing traffic off the internet and out of public view of packet sniffers. That means that each server farm has to have a public and private network - which can get expensive.
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