The cloud – it’s all the hype right now, but what does it mean? Simply stated, it is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. The name was inspired by the cloud symbol that’s often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams. Chances are, you are already using an application in the cloud or storing files there. Are you using gmail or facebook? Have you ever uploaded anything to the internet? Do you have a website?

Years ago, when you had a website, you would have it sitting on a server in your office. But as more people stopped by to visit your website, you needed new, bigger and better servers to handle all of this traffic. This became costly and took more time and resources to maintain it all. New businesses were formed that bought lots of servers and did all of the work to service them and sold you space to put your website on their servers. In other terminology, they “host” your website. Where is the content from your website physically sitting? It could be in a datacenter anywhere. It is in the cloud.

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