The cloud hosting you enjoy today – mostly free of charge – has a long, long history – way before the term “cloud computing” has becoming popular. It’s all started back in the 60’s, when John McCarthy predicted that computation may someday be organized as a public utility. Since then, computing has gone a long way to cloud hosting/storage we know today.

Everything cloud kicked off in the 90s, with one of the pioneers, Salesforce, introduced online apps for enterprise – something that we call Software as a Service (SaaS) today. In 2000s, the cloud has exploded: Rackspace – the cloud fanatics – has users from 120 countries subscribing for its cloud hosting services. There are almost $60 billion in revenue was made by cloud vendors in 2009 alone.

Email hosting also enjoy dramatic growth – many hosted exchange is now residing in the cloud benefiting from all the goodness of the cloud.

…then enter mobile technology – a revolutionary technology that enhances the cloud growth – 1 new server is added to the cloud for every 600 smartphones. Apple iCloud serves 125 million of Apple’s mobile device users.

Yeah – whether you like it or not, the future is in the cloud: the cloud market size will reach $150 billion by 2020. Indeed, the growth of cloud hosting is dramatic.

Here’s an infographic to give you some insights on how the cloud has evolved… (click for a larger version.)

Via CloudTweaks – published by Vi.net