Design Apps for SharePoint - Hosting Patterns

Different Hosting Patterns for SharePoint App

Cloud-hosted: Includes at least one remote component and may also include SharePoint-hosted components. Within this category are two important types of apps:

• Provider-hosted: Apps whose non-SharePoint components are deployed by your—the developer's—logic and are usually hosted on your hardware or cloud account, but in some scenarios they are hosted by the customer. The SharePoint components are installed to the customer's SharePoint website, either on premises or in SharePoint Online. You are responsible for designing and enforcing a system of tenant isolation for this type of app.
• Autohosted: Apps that are installed to a host web on the customer's SharePoint Online tenancy, with components automatically installed into a Windows Azure Web Site account. The Windows Azure Web Sites infrastructure manages isolation of tenancies.

SharePoint-hosted: Apps that include only SharePoint components and that are installed on the customer's own SharePoint Online tenancy or its own on-premises SharePoint farm.