Understanding the cloud vs. a website

- When drawing diagrams of networking systems, the internet is always portrayed as a cloud. Why is that? Because there are so many ways in and out of the system. The internet was designed to be decentralized, with many different routes to the same information. When your files are in the cloud, that means they're stored somewhere out there on a server someplace. A great example of cloud services is email. 20 years ago, email was frequently stored on the computer in front of you. You used a program like Outlook or Eudora, which pulled the email from the server and onto your computer where you could read it or store it. However, there were serious downsides to this model. What happened when you wanted to read your email someplace other than that specific computer? What happened if the hard drive broke, or what happened if you got a new computer? Somehow you had to figure out how to backup your email or transfer it to other computers. Today, most people have a cloud based email like…