What is cloud hosting, computing and storage?

Cloud hosting is essentially using many servers together in a managed-hosting solution, often with multiple datacentres. Cloud computing is similar, but one gets allocated a certain amount of computing resources to process data or run programs, or distributes tasks between numerous clients or processing nodes. Cloud storage spans data across many servers (and often replicated), again often with multiple datacentres. Cloud services typically allow replicated data to be stored and accessible nearer to each end-user, offering higher speed as well as reliability. However, cloud services are not infallible and often can experience outages due to a critical misconfiguration or failure, nor does it prevent bugs in the user software causing other problems.

The main differences between cloud hosting and using many dedicated servers is cloud hosting is still "shared hosting", managed by the operator and individual servers are indistinguishable for the subscriber as well as the end-users. It's perhaps this reason why cloud hosting and the like is erroneously believed to be "serverless". Software of any kind still runs on hardware, or computers, while any computer that provides a service to clients or servers is deemed a "server".

The "cloud" was likely named after the fact that educational and engineering diagrams often depicted the internet (as a common service, without breaking down details) with a cloud-resembling icon. It's important to remember the two are not the same - cloud services use the internet, which is merely a telecommunication medium, or courier, to deliver said services and obtain data.

Last update on 2023-03-13 by DNC admin.

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