Thank you for the explanation. I have a customer that may be (if they can afford to) candidate for the cloud application. They run my Web application inside their intranet. The IT of the company won't allow them to expose the app to the Internet (afraid of security breach) even though they need to. So if they were to buy the cloud VM then I could install the app on the VM and it would be available to Intranet.

>There are different levels of cloud hosting. The terminology sucks.
>
>Basically you do good old Web Hosting online - that's services like GoDaddy, Discount ASP etc. that sell you a 'site' on their servers. You can either host a shared site where you have a Web site configured on a machine running a bunch of other customers on the same IIS.
>
>Then there's VM hosting which lets you put an entire Windows partition into a server. This is more extensive, and really like co-location used to be except that you don't get a phsyical box. THe provider gives you a Virtual Machine on a server somewhere that is either shared or dedicated to you depending on the pricing level you pick.
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>In both cases it means the apps are not running inside of your company - they're remotely hosted and administered.
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>Cloud in applications typically means that the DATA is stored online (which most Web site data is - so this is not all that excitingly new :-)) and that it is shared. Cloud data is often associated with synced data is persisted amongst multiple applications/devices where the server serves as the central service that hosts data.
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>None of this is new or particularily special - Cloud 'computing' is mostly marketing hype around very simple and old principles...
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>+++ Rick ---
>
>>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.:
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>>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:
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>>http://CloudServer/MyAppName/MainPage.aspx
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>>
>>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.
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>>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.
>>>
>>>+++ Rick ---