What is your definition of cloud hosting?

[mike2011]

A previous post has me thinking more about cloud hosting. How exactly do you define cloud hosting? I see that some companies define cloud hosting in a way that is different than other.s Ideally cloud hosting should improve cost effectiveness and shoudl be kinder to the environment.

[emad]

Cloud hosting is a type of hosting where applications, data and such for a website are spread across several different servers. Therefore, if there is a problem with one server, the website will not go down. This should make a website more efficient. I think balancing the hosting over different servers also helps improve energy efficiency.

[John789]

Cloud hosting is when a website is present on more than one server. Instead of limited to a single server like what we have in traditional hosting services (dedicated/shared hosting), the website now has the access to multiple servers. Virtually, the processing power is unlimited as you can always add a new server and scale up.

[charlez]

How is cloud hosting different from cluster hosting? I remember a couple years ago that there were a few hosts that said they were different than others because they used cluster hosting and balanced websites on more than one server?