Read on for a brief, simple, explanation of the differences between cloud hosting, cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS). Find out how these three fit together and how they are similar yet different.
What is Cloud?
The term ‘cloud’ simply refers to a distribution of resources. There can be ‘cloud’ anything – so long as the resources are spread amongst multiple locations, devices, servers, teams of staff, and so on. In the most abstract, it simply means distributed pooled resources.
What is Cloud Hosting?
The phrase ‘cloud hosting’ is used to describe a pool of website servers, generally spread across multiple racks, server farms, cities and even countries. It can exist in a single rack of servers just as it can exist in a massive pool of servers spread across many datacenters and time zones.
In reality, it’ss nothing more than a combination of servers that have jointly pooled their resources so that hosting clients can serve up their websites to their intended audience, usually the buying public at large.
What is Cloud Computing / SaaS?
Cloud Computing is an application that runs across a server cloud. This isn’t the low level hosting of files and databases, but rather is a specific instance of an application running across the hosting platform. It’s the distribution, internet accessibility and remote hosting that forms these key components of Cloud Computing.
What is SaaS?
SaaS is generally thought of as just the internet enabling of an application, so that end users can access from around the web AND without having to host the application themselves. It’s a distributed delivery approach for a software application. However, SaaS is also much more. It’s not just a pool of resources. It’s not just an application on the web. It’s all the administrative facility, like billing and management, that goes into offering an application across a distributed network.
