New cloud providers are popping up every month and many traditional service providers are rebranding services as cloud hosting. First off, as most Data Center Knowledge readers may know, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud platforms are a viable alternative to traditional server and storage infrastructure. And while this article will focus on IaaS, many of my points are relevant for Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) clouds, too. Almost all cloud providers offer a utility-based pricing model where you can use the resources you need and then simply pay for the resources that you use. When comparing cloud providers, you need to be aware of three different pricing dimensions: computing, storage and bandwidth.