Ahh, you mean something like horizontal vs vertical scaling I suppose? I had never heard of it being described like this before, but then I'm just a hobbyist more than anything, thank you for clarifying. I agree that ultimately trusting strictly in physical hardware is dangerous, but again I do think it's more about data than anything else.

I do have a potentially silly question, since we're at it, where exactly is data on the cloud actually stored, doesn't cloud computing also require physical hardware to back it up? Admittedly, a question best aimed at search engines, but you talk a lot about how physical hardware is inconvenient.