You are like 3 years behind on technology my friend. You have no idea how Cloud is created, nor do you know what the technology consits of. And yes. I can build the same Cloud that Amazon has if I had there money. But I don't. I know more about cloud and virtualizaton in my left hand, then you know about hosting in general. You are making yourself look like a fool for anyone who knows about this technology, and you are supposed to be a hosting company. Not saying your shared accounts are not good. But you obviously do not host large enterprise customers.

I am certified in both VMware and Citrix. If you want me to scan my certificates for you, let me know. So I have done my homework. I have sold and built my share of private clouds to many private companies.

You truely have no idea what Cloud hosting is.

Here are some reason why people go virtual
-Less Power Consumption - usually around a 10 or 15 to 1 ration of physical server to virtual server
-Ease of management - creating a virtual server with Windows 2008 R2 takes about an hour from start to finish to roll out a new server. Good luck ordering new hardware, building it, installing the OS and having it online in less then 3 days if you dont have a spare server in stock
-High availability - Using VMware, you can use VMotion, DRS and HA to ensure if one physical host fails, the virtual servers will move to the other physical host automatically.
-Less switching infranstructure - You can also use virtual nic's with VMware and you can do inter VLan routing and switch management with the Cisco v1000 virtual switch on top of VMware
- Maximize hardware - If you take the average server, they usually use 10-15% of there resources (this is fact, look it up), which means you are paying for 85-90% of a server you will never use. This is a waste of money

This is just off the top of my head. I can go on. But again, you have no idea what Cloud is used for or what its made of.

Cloud hosting is when you use a server provider who has their servers in a blimp that floats in the clouds.

Lets go Tim Tebow

Clouds are cool and misunderstood. Why you want to babysit a battery of servers while everything can be in a cloud? I'm not talking about storage but also running PaaS (Platform as a Service).

I personally believe this is the future

It is not the future, it is now. Virtual Desktops is the future. Server virtualization is a standard in corporate data centers for atleast the last 2-3 years. It is just coming into the hosting game recently. But for companies who use a good amount of servers, it is the way to go.

I know! Just talking from my perspective, developing/deploying apps without babysitting and worry about servers and reachability, cloud storage and paas cloud is really cool.

From a consumers perspective Virtual Desktops is for sure the future thing. It would be nice to have the same desktop on your tablet/PC/TV including your working environment.

Yea. One thing I agree with some of what the other people have said here, is that some cloud services are not stable. Amazon for one has had there issues with downtown. I do not know exactly what has caused it, but I do believe it is because they are not replicating to other locations and there was a datacenter failure. I am not exactly sure. But things such has Hosted Exchange are getting questioned a lot, from many companies I know that have been using there own Exchange/BES servers. And most are pretty stables, Rackspace, App River. Microsoft 365 is going to be huge right now. Salesforce.com is huge. Best contact management system around. all hosted solutions, or Cloud, or Software as a Service, you choose the name. VIrtual Desktop has gotten a lot of attention in the last couple of years. But very costly for a Small to Medium size business. The outlay for hardware, software and setup is very high upfront costs. With not enough ROI to make a huge difference. Much better for bigger corps. People with huge call centers. So people are going for small monthly payments, even though the end result is a higher cost. But same desktop anywhere on any computer, tablet etc. Its awesome.

I use Citrix XenApp on my iPad. All my work software and drive shares are there. I can work the same form any PC. Its not a true desktop. But gets the job done.

have been doing cloud hosting banners, cant wait to do stratosphere ads! yes!

You guys are nuts, virtual desktops are not the future. People will not trust their private data to a company. I think your living in the clouds.

The future is nano technology. Meaning computers the size of a business card that will project the interactive screen and keyboard. AND sorry but the data will still be saved within the unit.

Lets hands in the cookie jar always means more cookies. Things will simplify not expand. That is the future.

I had sex on a cloud once.

How many people are using Dropbox, public mailservers, etcetera? People are already trusting their private data to companies.

Till now I only know nano tech from the big movies. For sure it can be used in various ways for consumer and business applications.

It might last for a little but it's only a couple inevitable hacks away from shutting down. Kind of like the sidekick but much worse.

Yea. we are nuts. You should go do some research. You are embarrassing yourself. Do you know military and other places of such strict security already use virtual desktops? Virtual desktops will be a trillion dollar industry in the next 2-5 years.

Gartners says it will surpase 65 billion in 2013 alone.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=920814

Do you even know who Gartners is? You should stop arguing for the state of arguing and go do your research. If you knew how much virtual desktops simplify and are not an expansion, you would know this. In your own sentence you proved yourself wrong. Most people who use Virtual Desktops already are using Wise Terminals for desktop usage, instead of normal sized PC's. Do you know you do not have to have another company involved to have virtual desktops. Most companies do it on there own. I can school you on reasons why this is better as well, but my last virtualization post covered most of it.

Anyway, the facts are above in the Gartner Report. And just so know you, Gartner is the #1 Technology research company in the world, and basically says what is good and what is not.