Question 1

What’s the difference between a cloud provider and a data center?

Accepted Answer

A data center is a physical building full of servers, networking, and power/cooling. A cloud provider owns and operates many data centers and sells access to them as on-demand services (like virtual machines, storage, and databases) with self-service provisioning, metered billing, and managed features.

Question 2

When should I use a cloud provider instead of buying my own servers?

Accepted Answer

Use a cloud provider when you want faster setup, the ability to scale up/down quickly, global regions, and managed services (databases, Kubernetes, analytics) without running the hardware yourself. Buying servers can make sense for very stable workloads, strict on-prem requirements, or when you already have a mature data center operation and predictable long-term capacity needs.

Question 3

How much does a cloud provider cost?

Accepted Answer

Costs are typically pay-as-you-go and depend on what you use: compute size and hours, storage amount and type, data transfer (especially outbound), managed database tiers, and support plans. Pricing also varies by region and discounts (reserved/committed use, savings plans). The biggest cost surprises for beginners are usually data egress, always-on resources, and overprovisioned instances.

Cloud Provider

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