Over the past few years, web server technology – much like everything else related to computers – has made incredible strides. Hosting companies have used all of these advances to create a new type of web server platform, typically called cloud hosting.

“That’s great,” you bemusedly say, “but what is cloud hosting?” A succinct explanation is that cloud hosting is a scalable set of virtualized servers.

To help you unpack what that means, we’re going to focus on two of the terms in that definition: virtualized servers and scalability.