Sorry if this is the wrong S/E for this type of question.
Well, I am asking what is a "Cloud Provider"? Is it just a hosting site? Is it something special? I know that the "Cloud" means internet, but thats all.
Sorry if this is the wrong S/E for this type of question.
Well, I am asking what is a "Cloud Provider"? Is it just a hosting site? Is it something special? I know that the "Cloud" means internet, but thats all.
Although "cloud" is largely the buzzword du jour, and people are using it for anything they want to sell, it generally means one of three things:
Lightweight virtual hosting, where you can deploy any number of dedicated virtual servers yourself by interacting with an API or simply a web page, and where you're generally billed per hour of use. Amazon EC2 is the prime example of this; Rackspace provides another.
Lightweight application hosting, where you write a program specifically for a specialized (generally proprietary) platform, and the provider hosts and runs the code. Again, you normally configure this yourself -- no human at the provider company needs to attend to requests individually. Google App Engine and Microsoft Windows Azure are the big names here, but many Ruby-on-Rails providers could be counted as well.
Software or infrastructure as a service, provided over the Internet and usually accessed through a web browser. In this sense, Google Docs or Photoshop Online might be counted, or even an Internet-based backup service. It could be anyone providing an app written on top of one of the above platforms, or it could simply be "on the internet!" This is where the term is at its most buzzwordy and least actually meaningful.