Application Hosting & Cloud Hosting?

It depends on who you're talking to, and whether they're using the "buzzword" definition of cloud computing or the true meaning of cloud computing.

The cloud computing "buzzword" has basically come to mean "a computer or piece of software available over the network". In that case, application hosting would be equivalent to cloud hosting or cloud computing.

True cloud computing means that hardware is just a commodity, and that your software can run anywhere, and might even move around from device to device without you even knowing it. In that case, cloud computing is not equivalent to application hosting.

Application Hosting implies getting your software on third party server. Application hosting service comes with following advantages:

· Anytime anywhere access to your application

· No need to provision beforehand for the future needs

· Remote backup and high network security

Cloud hosting essentially derives from application hosting, distributed computing and virtualization technologies. So the two most important features of cloud hosting that differentiates from application hosting are: One, unlimited elasticity of the network at short notice facilitated by virtualization. This also reduces the costs per head of the application.

Secondly, Distributed computing where in due to distributed nature of the network storage, processing and other features may be not located or processed at one place so as to allow faster response time.

Thus cloud computing allows:

· Infrastructure, software or development platform as a service

· And secondly easy implementation process wherein the user is not concerned with the backend technology that host the application