The beauty of the cloud is that the level and amount of service one can obtain varies greatly. For something as simple as a basic hosting plan to run your web application, you can use any number of services that are considered a Platform as a Service (PaaS). This is a service that provides a platform for you to host and run your web application. Increasing in scale and complexity, you can turn to an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, which offers an entire cloud-based data center at your disposal.

Cloud-based hosting costs can vary greatly because of the simple fact that they are so scalable. Your costs can fluctuate throughout a single month dramatically, depending directly on your need for power (that is, during more demanding times of the month and/or with big social media hits such as HackerNews or Reddit). On the flip side, if you require very little power for a server, you can often get cloud hosting for free!