Basically, the Cloud is here. But then it has been for a while. The Cloud has been around a while. We used to use it to describe the Internet. Then we used it to describe the Frame Relay system when explaining how PVC's worked. Now there is reference to MPLS as a private cloud, which it kind of is. The MPLS network is virtually separate from all other networks. BellSouth Metro Ethernet works in a virtual cloud. Each circuit is a VLAN mapped to a host circuit. The Metro E architecture is a private cloud.
Email is in the cloud. Doesn't matter if it is Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail or Hosted Exchange, it's in the Cloud. It is attached to the Internet for you to access your email from any Internet enabled device.
Shared hosting is where most of your websites sit. GoDaddy's 43M customers host mainly on shared web servers. These shared web servers make up some of the Cloud.
It's interesting because I saw an ad for a company today with the tag line: "Hosting, Reinvented™ - change how you think about web application setup and hosting." "Shared hosting was a great advance in application development. In 1999." Standing Cloud talks about root control, reliability, simplicity, efficiency. Key items to discuss. (But I would have added Redundancy and Security).
Standing Cloud also talks open source web applications - a lot of them. The Cloud is all about web apps and high availability of the data through those apps. Users want to be able to access email, contacts, pricing, status, voicemail any where they are connected to the interwebs. That is basically what the cloud is all about.
Thanks so much for posting about us, Peter! Would love to know where you heard about us. It's interesting that the two problems you bring up are redundancy and security; we agree with you and our CEO Dave actually blogged about those issues here.
Do you have more questions or things you'd like to discuss? We'd love to keep the conversation going! Hit us up on Twitter @standing_cloud.