Lincoln said that calling a tail a leg does not make a horse a five legged animal. Hosting an application in a cloud computing environment does not mean that you are doing cloud computing.

One of the reasons that people are attracted to cloud computing is because they do not have to host their own infrastructure or run a data center. But that is true of traditional hosting. Now the feature sets of a cloud computing environment may make you want to host there, but that is only an enlightened hosting decision.

Let's make this clear with an example.
Suppose I decide that I do not want to run my traditional ASP.NET application in my data center. I have a web front end, and a back-end database.

Potentially, I have to pay for:

Let's assume this translates to the following configuration:

Researching some of the Service Providers I found the following costs for this configuration:

None of these providers are traditional hosters (provide your own machines, and rent bandwidth, cooling, or electricity). Nor are ORCS Web's and Rackspace's offerings to build a colocated data center considered.

Virtualizing your data center is not considered here as cloud computing because you still have to build out to maximum capacity. Nontheless, it might be considered cloud computing from the point of view of your internal users if they can get resources elastically.

So we see there are cheaper options if you just want to host. Now if you want to some feature that one hosting company has that the other does not, say blob storage, you could use that in conjunction with your host (say Amazon or Azure blobs).

Hosting is hosting no matter where you do it. Hosting an application in a cloud computing environment does not mean you are doing cloud computing.