Hmmmm…well, ok, it’s evolved and the boundaries become sloppier.

Used to be one simple definition: Somebody who owned a bunch of servers and set up Web sites for people on them for a monthly fee. There evolved a whole ecosystem of standard control panels and packages and pricing–it became a commodity–and a hosting company was a hosting company.

Most broadly and eternally, it might be defined as “digital landlord”, or “provider of leased computing facilities”. The technology has changed, cloud technology is steamrolling the old hosting companies still using the old standalone servers, and the ability to buy what seems like a whole and complete (but virtual) server in the cloud is much more than the pallid term “hosting” ever promised. So I’d just go with “landlord” and not worry about specifying what technology they use.

Well, as Tom loves to point out…”No one ever put a gun to your head….”

And what the hell IS a “hosting company”, anyway?

The cloud isn’t all that different from a conventional hosting company insofar as, either way, you’re leasing and not buying/owning. And here be the top of a slippery and recursive slope in which we end up questioning the very concept of property…shhh, let’s not draw Tom, he can sense talk like that without even opening a post!

It’s no more or less sinister than any other landlord/tenant lord/serf relationship. Given that money changes hands, there’s a simple measure of the degree of my exploitation by Amazon.

Before I moved into the cloud, I paid about $225/month to house a server at an ISP. I think I spent a couple of grand building the machine, too.

Now, I pay less than $50/month.

Perhaps the ink cartridge/toner/rasor blades chestnut doesn’t really apply. I don’t see that kind of dependency structure in the cloud arrangement. I do pay a yearly fee to buy down the hourly virtual machine rental, but that’s all I’d have at stake should I choose to move somewhere else. They have very little hold on me.

I would say that as gigacorporations intent on eating humanity go, Amazon’s not so bad. Kind of the Sears & Roebuck of the 21st. I feel empowered when I click and two days later somebody knocks on the door to hand me my purchase. It’s capitalism’s djinn.

I you sell someone a thing, they can always maintain it, enhance it, replace it, even duplicate it. And there will be a strong financial incentive for them to keep it up and running effectively as long as possible. But the buyer pays the vendor once.

If you sell someone a service, not only do they rent instead of own, but the buyer must also agree to pay for the implicit costs of maintenance, support and upgrades, whether he needs them or not, and submit to the vendor’s schedule and prices as well. The buyer pays the vendor forever.

It’s why printers are cheap but ink cartridges so expensive. Market research has demonstrated people replace their cars more often when they lease than when they buy.

Servers by definition exist in public, and most often they’re housed in shared facilities for economic reasons. Only the biggest sites can afford to build and operate their own high-bandwidth infrastructure. The cloud is just another form of a shared facility.

It is true that cloud technology means that you have a more “intimate” relationship with your host, and, if security fails, your neighbors, and it’s the latter that has scared some people. And I can’t argue: If your operation moves and stores sensitive data, you’d better take extra precautions like high-strength encryption everywhere in any hosted environment.

What happened to us (and all of Amazon’s customers, in a rolling wave; the university got hit a few days ago) applies to any hosting facility, not just cloud. When you’re leasing space, your landlord is responsible for maintaining the machine (hardware or virtual), and that includes patching the OS kernel.

The residual that’s not excusable and bit annoying is leaving my machines in a nonfunctional state upon rebooting. I may do a reboot myself later tonight to see what happens, because the failure of those software servers to restart may well be a result of my mistake configuring them.

Tempest in a teapot from my point of view. All in a day’s work.

But wait…on the subject of using the cloud for personal data, very different considerations apply. Right now, the most popular use of cloud storage is MP3s and other media, and unless you happen to own a collection of illegally over-the-line porn, the consequences of exposure of that kind of data is pretty much zero. OTOH, there’s sensitive personal data that it makes sense to store off-site, and if you do that–on the cloud or anywhere else–you’d better encrypt it. Heavily. Do that, and you can use the cloud with a clear conscience.

I can attest is that cloud data storage is very reliable. Remember the four-day Amazon outage? That was a bad experience, but they eventually restored all our data from their backups. Cloud storage is mirrored in realtime and backed up periodicially, so if you use it for a backup, you’re getting the security of a backup-backup as well. That reliability is why there is some data you really should store offsite in the cloud.

A lot of people are pushing the idea of moving applications and data out there into the “cloud” so your computer is basically just a terminal.

I use Carbonite for a tertiary backup, but all my apps, data, and primary backups are right where I can lay my hands on them, and others can’t. I like it that way.

If whoever operates “the cloud” can take you down like that, at their whim or upon the failure of their equipment or software, I suspect I’d rather rely upon my own stuff.