What is this new hosting concept called Cloud Hosting and how is it different from a VPS or dedicated server? Is it pay per GB of bandwidth and space?
cloud hosting offers high scalability so you dont have to worry in case your site experiences sudden extreme growth. cloud hosting is pretty expensive compared to normal dedicated hosting, but takes away some worries... http://www.joyent.com/ is probably the best service. i have no direct experience since i love tweaking on my server and scripts myself.
Not all cloud hosting operates the same, some offer elastic servers and others are offering clouds that are elastic. Elastic Server means your vps can grow in memory and disk space capabilities automatically, eventually taking over multiple machines Some companies say they have a cloud but what they mean is you can add more vps's to your account, meaning your account overall is elastic but each server in your cloud may have fixed capabilities that you must upgrade manually rather than automatically like an elastic server
Amazon has the Elastic Computing Cloud web service which is basically cloud hosting by amazon. For bandwidth, I think you have to pay for only what you use just like Amazon S3.
I agree with the comments above. Cloud web hosting is very expensive thing which you do not need for your small web site.
Hello, Cloud-hosted website is functioning on several connected servers. In spite of limited to a particular server like what we have in conventional hosting services (dedicated/shared hosting), the website now has the access to numerous servers. Almost, the processing power is infinite as you can forever add a new server and scale up.
I agree with all above mentioned points. Cloud has more features than what a dedi or shared can offer. Hardware fault tollerence, High availability, centralized storage for many cloud servers, instant scalability, cloning of cloud serves for testing purposes are also added advantage of cloud servers. Also check this out http://digg.com/d31VgYd
The price factor between dedicated and cloud is getting very slim, more people are interested in cloud because the uptime is good.
Cloud is just the platform and underlying hardware. A VPS is either in a Cloud configuration or on a single dedicated machine depending on the level of your hosting provider. It can be cheap, to very expensive depending on your requirements.