> If somebody else wires up a server in their closet and rents it out to me, that's a cloud. The cloud means not having to think about things like hard drives failing, and keeping hot spares of servers.
I'd say a VPS could nominally be called part of a cloud, but most serious deployments, pre-cloud, were some sort of colo arrangement where if a hardware part died you had to either drive up to the DC and go swap out for a new one, or else call up the DC staff and ask them nicely to fix it for you. Your hosting wasn't a black box.
I'm confused (and perhaps younger than you). It went like this: servers under desk -> colo -> vps/cloud/everything as a service? There wasn't a huge dedicated hosting market between colo and cloud?
Pre-cloud that was called "hosting" :P