Again, thank you for your additional explanation. What I am wondering is the following. I have an ASP.NET application that runs on customers' intranet (not Internet). Any person on their network can access the application by entering into the browser a URL such as, e.g.:

http://servername/MyAppName/MainPage.aspx

If I purchase one of these "cloud" services, from Amazon or another vendor, could I install my app on their VM (in the cloud) and have anybody in world access the application via Internet (not Intranet), without having to VPN to the server. So the URL would kind of be the same (except for the server name) but the rest is just like now:

http://CloudServer/MyAppName/MainPage.aspx

But now as I type this I see no difference between the above described "cloud" based application and any web hosting. For example, I am paying a web hosting company for my company web site (developed in ASP.NET). And in fact I could probably host there a web application just as well.

What am I not understanding?



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>"Cloud" is a very abstract term and really all it means is that it's not hosted onsite. Cloud just means accessible from anywhere if you boil it down. This can mean a plain Web application that serves all of its content from a hosting provider (VMs often when you're talking about cloud providers like Amazon or Microsoft Azure) all the way to distributed services and data storage that stores data in "cloud" services that are accessible over the Web directly.
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>In the end it's all just Web hosted technology - nothing magical about it.
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>+++ Rick ---