You hear about ‘the cloud’ everywhere, as if it were magic or mysterious. The reality is far simpler: the cloud is someone else’s computer, accessible over the Internet.

‘In the cloud’ = on remote servers

When your photos are ‘in the cloud’, they aren’t floating in the air: they sit on servers, in data centres, that a company manages for you. You access them over the Internet, from any device.

The benefit: you have no machine to buy and no server to maintain. You rent a service.

The three main models

The cloud is often classified into three levels, from the most ‘raw’ to the most ‘turnkey’:

• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): you rent bare servers (compute power, storage) and install whatever you want. E.g. AWS EC2, OVHcloud.
• PaaS (Platform as a Service): you rent a ready-made platform to run your application, without managing the server. E.g. Vercel, Heroku.
• SaaS (Software as a Service): you use finished software, online, on a subscription. E.g. Gmail, Notion, Shopify.

The higher you go (IaaS → SaaS), the less technical work you handle — but the less control you have.

Why the cloud is appealing

• Elasticity: you adjust resources on demand (a traffic spike? you scale up; afterwards? you scale down).
• Pay-as-you-go: you pay for what you consume, with no large upfront investment.
• Availability: data is replicated and accessible everywhere.

The questions to ask

• Cost: convenient, but a usage-based bill can spiral without monitoring. Set up alerts.
• Lock-in: migrating everything to one provider creates a dependency (hard to leave).
• Data: where is it stored? Under which jurisdiction? It becomes a GDPR question if it concerns individuals.

Cloud and web hosting

For a website, the cloud is just one hosting option among others (see shared, VPS, cloud). It shines for applications that scale up, but stays overkill for a simple showcase site — static or shared hosting does the job perfectly well.

In short: the cloud is a powerful tool, not an obligation. Choose it when its elasticity answers a real need.