What is the difference between standard hosting and cloud hosting?

[Ryuzaki]

I'm seeing some hosting companies now referring to their old standard offers now as "legacy servers" while offering a new nomenclature using the words "cloud hosting."

I can't tell how much of this is just marketing and can't really get a clear idea from any searches or even asking their support.

For instance, Legacy VPS Hosting versus Cloud VPS Hosting. Or Shared Hosting versus Cloud Shared Hosting.

What is "cloud" getting at here?

 

[Ryuzaki]

Okay, I finally got a straight answer. It's what I assumed, which is that they can distribute your site across several "points" (hard drives?). I guess like sharding.

Let me just paste the answer instead of paraphrasing it:

The SSD VPSs are based on OpenVZ which is a containerization technology whereas Cloud servers are based on KVM which is a true virtualization technology. The latter gives you a bit more control within the VPS (specifically over the kernel) so things like CloudLinux will work. The cloud platform is based on a distributed storage architecture, so in simple terms, we keep bits of your data stored across multiple redundant points, which allows the cloud server to provide much higher backend resource limits. SSD VPSs have their data stored locally on the physical hardware node which your VPS resides.​

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In other words, they distribute your files around in order to distribute the resource usage as well.

If anyone can add more info, I'd like to learn more. Hopefully this helps anyone else wondering the same thing.

 

[Rageix]

First I've heard of this. What providers are you seeing this on?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I'm looking at Knownhost in particular (actually picked up another server, this time of the cloud variety).

But I Google'd "cloud hosting" and see Siteground, Hostgator, DigitalOcean, Amazon, Dreamhost, Rackspace, Hostwinds, Liquid Web, 1&1, pretty much everyone now.

 

[GarrettGraff]

True Cloud hosting also implements scaling on demand. Say you expect your website to get 1 million hits a month and allocate xxxx resources, but find at the end of June it was a waste - you scale it back to yyyy resources that can cover 500k hits.

Or, even more granular, on a weekly, and even daily basis. From everybody I've talked to that is heavy into hosting their own systems, it still isn't *generally* cost effective to be hosting in the "cloud" vs. having a rack at a data center. A good friend of mine spends 25k annually on his rack between rent and hardware and says it still isn't close to what he'd have to spend on cloud hosting.

While redundancy is important you have to question how actually critical it is to us as "small" users. I believe it is just chasing diminishing returns - at our size anyways.