Are cloud computing and hosting the same thing?

Cloud computing and hosting are different, although certain types of "hosting" can be a component of cloud computing. There are many flavors of hosting, including where you "own" the computing resources (i.e. servers and storage) but are having them "hosted" at a co-location facilities. However, increasingly, there are also plenty of hosting operations where you basically "rent" either dedicated or shared computing resources - for example, to run your website. In addition, many of these hosting providers deliver "managed" services to help you maintain your specific resources within their hosted operations.

Cloud computing (at least to me) is the ability to outsource some amount of your computing resource needs (I'll use server and storage as examples again) from a hosted resource. Assuming the hosted resource provides these services in a specific way (you rent resources, fees are based your utilization or throughput, you can increase or decrease the amount of resources you need at any time, the provider has a virtualized infrastructure, etc.), they are a cloud provider.

Cloud computing has taken on other meanings as well, including hosted applications (SaaS), as well as hosted development environments (i.e. Force.com).

Of course, Cloud Computing and Hosting are different. In simple words :

Cloud Computing is a business model offers Software/Platform/Hardware/Consultancy/Tools/Products/Support etc. on service based concept and create a win-win scenario for both consumer and vendor to take maximum advantage of share services framework. The ice breaking service offering in this model is the end customer will not own anything and will pay only for the usage of the service.

Whereas Hosting is a solution (Software/Platform/Hardware/Consultancy/Tools/Products/Support etc.) provided to consumers (NOT as a service), in which the solutions can be owned by the vendor OR the consumer but the payment model is not like using as pay per use. Entire payment model is divided into OTC (One Time Charges) and ARC (Annual Recurring Charges).

Hope this helps.

Cloud computing means accessing application over internet. Which means you don't own any thing. It means, pay per use model.

You can pay for 'usage'. You don't need a physical hardware.

I hope I got it right in understanding it.

Hosting will be automatically taken care of.

You can say both are same but with two different names....
In both Cloud Computing and hosting you dont need to take care of the services provided to you. You have to just take care of the things at your end only, rest of the work is managed by hosting providers themselves.

For more info read these articles:
http://www.myrealdata.com/cloud-computing.html

We've done a poor job as an industry defining cloud computing. Organizations see the dollar signs behind this notion of "cloud" today and get knee-deep in marketing campaigns that really have little to do with true cloud computing. The bottom line is that cloud computing is a new paradigm of serving and consuming computing resources as a utility. As such, there are no terms, no fixed length contracts, it is pay-per-use, and self service. So - the more traditional concept of hosting is quite similar, but maybe not exactly the same.

The “cloud” is in its infancy so businesses tend to market their hosting as “cloud”. Remember, cloud does NOT have to be pay per use – check out the Amazon price list for dedicated VMs!

The future cloud will work like your phone. I can make a call from Virginia (on Cox) to a family member in Colorado (on Qwest); do not care that it made 15 ops through 4 carriers (it’s their problem to settle the funding); know that the connection will be made; trust that nobody is listening in (perception that it is secure); know how much the call will cost; and know that the charges will stop when I hang up. If I make the call from my iPhone on AT&T while on a bus I will get exactly the same result! That is how I see the cloud in the future.

It is not there yet and will depend on businesses to work together (i.e. the carriers) to provide this seamless cloud computing environment. I do not see this happening very quickly or easily but, when it does, it will upset the computing industry apple cart (now loaded up with licensing money).

I think, for the most part, hosting (assuming the vendor owns the hardware, o/s, and support) and cloud can be indistinguishable except for the marketing term.

Quite simply, Cloud computing is a different way of getting technology services. The comments above refer only to public cloud offerings but there are also private cloud offerings where the cloud infrastructure (servers, storage, etc) are owned by the same company receiving the cloud services. In this case you are both hosting cloud services and getting cloud services.

So with this background let's get back to your question. Are Cloud Computing and Hosting the same thing? They are not. There are three major differences.

1) Hosting provides an infrastructure that typically does not scale easily. A company can run out of capacity (cpu, storage) and it would take several weeks to procure and install additional capacity. With cloud computing, the infrastructure scales to meet demands dynamically. (Yes Cloud computing does have limits to how much it can scale but it scales much easier than legacy hosting environments).

2) Cloud applications can be accessed from anywhere an internet connection is available. Legacy hosting applications typically are not Internet friendly and perform poorly over the internet.

3) As mentioned by others on this thread, applications are provided as a service. You pay for what you use. If you have 100 users, you only pay for 100 users. You don't pay for any extra storage or extra servers in the data center that are not being used. You also don't pay for staff to keep your data secure, you don't pay to keep the servers patched and updated. You don't pay for system monitoring or backups. All this is included in your base rate.

The three major advantages for using cloud services are scalability. If you need 20 development and QA servers for 3 months, the cloud can provide those to you within hours. Pay for them while you use them and when you are done, shut them down and you stop paying for them.

The second advantage is convenience. Users can access the applications from anywhere, from home, the office or while traveling.

The third advantage is financial. Companies don’t have to invest the financial capital to buy their systems and pay for a technical staff to maintain them. They could use that capital to invest in their core business to grow their core competencies instead.

Aaron, I don't want to repeat what others have said already, as I believe that, at this point, the answer is clear.
To reinforce some of the concepts that have been shared, I think that the main items to remember will typically revolve around the nature of the cloud model. They are generally represented by a higher level of abstraction (provided by a self-service mechanism) as well as consumption-based metering & billing. Lastly, and from an underlying infrastructure perspective, there's the illusion of resource/capacity elasticity, which in the case of Hybrid Cloud models, aims to provide seamless workload mobility and on-demand capacity growth, ultimately even across multiple environments, i.e. private and public clouds. (there are clearly varying degrees of this in today's platforms and implementations, but those are the main tenets, promises if you will, of the cloud model)

Also, when you look at Cloud with the "as a Service" metaphor in mind, I believe the disctinction is further clarified.