Is anyone familiar here with cloud hosting? We recently switched to a provider that makes this possible and we're very happy with it. It makes it much easier for us to work from a distance.

How does cloud hosting differ from that of regular hosting (from a user level)? What control panel are you using for the hosting account?

Any issues with Database's or email retrieval residing "in the cloud"?

I have heard great things about rackspace but get ready to pay a arm and leg.

By "cloud server" do you mean the billing scheme or virtualization in general?

Long distances? What's cloud hosting got to do with working remotely?

Cloud hosting is all about allowing for a scalable hosting environment?

I thought cloud hosting is about instant scalability and cloud redundancy. Basically, every server in the cloud is for every of the websites; and each website is hosted on the cloud instead of on a single server.

MOD NOTE: Edited for self-linking.

A "Cloud Server" is actually just a cleverly marketed VPS.

Virtualization hasn't yet progressed to the point where an instance of an operating system exists independent of any physical node, or individual server.

You're right to think that the cloud is about scalability -- but that does not mean just scaling one OS instance. The maximum resources one OS instance can consume is still limited by the amount of resources available on one hardware node. Instead, you can have an unlimited number of OS instances (limited by your providers resources, of course). Each instance will most definitely be tied to a single machine, however.

In terms of reliability, clouds do provide failover via shared storage, whereby if one machine goes down each guest boots up on a host with available resources, but this by no means entails your Virtual Machine being active on all nodes at the same time.

Hope that clears things up for you.

A VPS may be a solution I forgot to mention to you if your looking for a lower price.