Cloud Hosting
Last updated: February 16, 2026
Cloud hosting refers to running applications on virtualized infrastructure provided by cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, or Railway. Instead of purchasing and maintaining physical servers, users provision compute, storage, and networking resources on demand and pay only for what they consume. This model offers flexibility and scalability that traditional hosting cannot match.
How It Works
Cloud hosting relies on virtualization technology to divide physical servers into multiple isolated virtual machines or containers. A hypervisor layer manages hardware resources and allocates them to individual workloads. Users request resources through APIs or dashboards, and the cloud platform provisions them within seconds. When demand increases, additional resources can be added automatically or manually; when demand drops, resources can be released to reduce costs.
Most cloud platforms organize their services into regions and availability zones, distributing infrastructure across multiple data centers. This geographic distribution enables redundancy and low-latency access for users worldwide. Applications can be deployed to a single region for simplicity or across multiple regions for high availability.
Cloud hosting comes in several forms: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides raw virtual machines, Platform as a Service (PaaS) adds application-level abstractions, and container-based platforms run Docker images with built-in orchestration. Each level trades some control for convenience.
Why It Matters
AI assistant workloads are inherently variable. A coding assistant might sit idle for hours, then handle intense bursts of activity with large context windows and rapid inference calls. Cloud hosting accommodates this variability far better than fixed-capacity infrastructure. Users avoid paying for idle servers during quiet periods while retaining the ability to scale up when traffic spikes.
For AI assistant platforms like OpenClaw, cloud hosting also simplifies deployment. Platforms such as Railway offer container-based cloud hosting with integrated persistent storage, environment variable management, and public networking -- all of which are required to run an assistant gateway with channel integrations in production.