I'm going to speak on this based the fact I have given the past year of my life to Cloud based hosting.

"Cloud Servers" or Cloud VPS as we call it. In a typical VPS solution you purchase a virtual machine that runs on a server with many more virtual machines. In a true cloud enviroment your VM (instance) is launched in the cloud. Sure, your instance might be running on a servers resources but the cloud knows what your instance is using and accomodates for it. What if the physical machine hosting your VPS has a kernal panic on the host? The cloud sees this and migrates you to other servers in the cloud.

That is the difference between a VPS and a cloud based VPS (or server) .. One might argue that is nothing more than "motioning" or "migrating" the server to another server. This is true unless the virtual server is running across all of the servers in the cloud to begin with. Which to be a true cloud this would be happening.

Cloud Based Hosting:

I read a user earlier compare clould hosting to clustered and load balanced hosting. They are nowhere in the same arena. Personally, my design was to launch multiple instances on to a cloud that are auto scaling and load balanced. They are looking to one central location for the content to serve. As a customers demands increase along with other customers the instances "scale up" across the cloud. In a typical clustered enviroment you have physical servers that can only do so much processing in a certain amount of time. Eventually enough customer load will saturate them.

In a true cloud there should be enough underlying infrasturcture to handle it. Even then there will be a maximum but additional servers should be added to the cloud before that happens.

I think this is enough for some more discussion to ensue. Flame away.

Brandon