I hesitated whether to write this article because it involves criticising the ubiquitous use of the word "Cloud". The motto for Net Quality Web Design is "Stand Out From The Cloud", a term I came up with several years ago.
I was reading an article and misread one of the sentences where it talked about standing out from the crowd. A very common term but in skimming past the phrase I misread it as to "Stand Out From The Cloud". I reread the sentence and realised my mistake. I also realised I had inadvertently come up with a great play on words and immediately adopted it as Net Quality's motto.
Nevertheless, I think it would be quite useful to discuss exactly what the cloud is.
I saw this phrase on somebody's t-shirt some years ago and I thought it was both a witty phrase but also very true. When we talk about the cloud, it sounds like we're talking about a space on the Internet where you can store files and information in some free space that just sits there for our use and does not require the hiring of computer servers. Nothing could be further from the truth.
When the term was first coined, it felt like something new had been created. This is not true. The way information on the Internet is stored remains the same. It is stored on a somebody's computer that is connected to the Internet. The only thing that changed is the way we describe it. So it really is true that there is no such thing as the cloud, it's just somebody else's computer.
Despite this criticism, I still think that the term is useful. There are many ways to store information on a server. It might be a file sitting on the hard drive of one connected server, in the case of many services it can be much more than this.
If you use a web storage service such as Dropbox, your files don't all sit together on the same hard drive. They are spread around a number of servers. They can also be stored in a number of different places to introduce an element of safety so that if one hard drive fails, no information is lost.
In this sense, thinking of it as the cloud rather than a server makes sense. You don't determine exactly where the information is stored, the service provider determines this in the background and makes that information available to you wherever you are and on whichever device(s) you nominate.
So it can be said, that every website you view is on the cloud. You do not need to know which server(s) hold the data and you do not need to know the location of the server(s). You just need to find the website on a search engine and click onto it, the cloud will do the rest.
If you would like a website that "Stands Out From the Cloud", contact me today.