the cloud is basically an interconnected society i can call it of servers with resources such as disk space, networking capacity, and physical ram, along with resoruces such as video graphics cards and of course, computer processors

so youve seen google cloud and microsoft azure, to be point and frank, aside form cloud apis, allow you to host a virtual private server (vps), along with software and hardware remotely through something called the cloud, which, again, is basically a huge server thats connected to other servers, sometimes in a large server room

so lets say you need an irc bouncer, and you dont have that much money. with a credit card ready enough to pay the balance past about 300$ (meaning google will charge you after 300$ of cloud credit.), but login to cloud.google.com and login with your gmail account info

somewhere there, you should be able to launch your own virtual private server, free for 300$ credit for new users, about 12-15$/mo in my case (not sure on the billing units), and you can assign a static ip completely free of charge, not sure of hte round robin process of storing and releasing ips, but you can infact setup a vps on google cloud completely free of charge, including using

just hcecked, its called a compute engine and virtual machines are called instances. its not that production ready since you literally have to code everything yourself, and its kind of a scam when you use other packages to launch lets say, wordpress, but yeah, if you really need that bnc by golly google cloud will get you that bnc for a short time

this way of running a virtual server is perfect, since you can simply ssh in (btw you can enable X11 forwarding on *sshd* (not ssh) on google cloud and get a remote x11 desktop, but more on that later), but its perfect for people who need a server and can possibly secure it depending on who you show

also running your own resolvable server is as easy as registering a domain and pointing the initial or @ dns entry to the static ip of your google cloud. but again, people hack.

heres a link to the basics of setting up an instance in google cloud: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/overview
embeddded link:

google azure works in the same way, but it offers mandatory access based windows domain hosting, its much like a vpn where theres a centralized authencation server which gives you access to stuff like email, certain websites, and you can write apps using microsoft technology for that lan and lan only. just seems like a bitch to properly secure and support over the years without money

happy typing!
unidef