Would you recommend cloud hosting to our clients? Why?

Not if they don't need it.

See what kind of responses you get if you are not explaining enough?

A recommendation is usually provided based on the needs of a client. If we don't know anything about a client, the scale of his/her operation and what their needs/objectives are, it is hard to recommend anything at all.

What I mean is would you recommend selling cloud hosting, sorry.

What exactly is cloud hosting? I understand the vague concept of it however in practice does it actually deliver any real benefit to clients, or is it a case of everyone jumping on the 'cloud hosting bandwagon'?

It's just a kind of marketing trick IMHO.

Cloud hosting has many different forms. It's not necessarily a marketing trick, but it is a buzz word these days.

Some clients need the power of clustered machines and scalable data. MOST do not!

Cloud solutions have panned out for some of our clients. For example, one of our clients was featured on Oprah. We thankfully had notice before the show aired, and we had them into one of our cloud setups. This allowed us to use multiple machines to power the site for the traffic that came in (millions of hits within a few hours). Once everything died down again, we were able to scale them back.

The power of cloud is the scalability, but MOST people will never need that kind of power.

This pretty much sums it up. Also with some providers Cloud hosting can save you costs on unused resources.

Like Conor said, there are some clients that need the power of clustered machines and the ability to scale quickly. Most of our cloud clients are larger firms local to Metro St Louis.

Cloud hosting is today's hottest technology. It mainly designs to provide 100% uptime, better resources management.
Just for example, in VMware cloud technology features like fault tolerance and high availability helps to provide 100% uptime for vps.
User experience zero downtime for their vps even if server hardware failed as their vps can be automatically moved to another server within fraction of second.
Similarly with the help of distributed resource scheduler the resource intensive vps can be moved automatically on server within cluster where it will have free resources.

No
Becuase I have no idea on what their requirements, expectations, limitations and budgets are

Cloud Hosting is just a Marketing Gimmick.

A benefit to clients and to the server node is Cloud Linux (http://cloudlinux.com/) but at the moment this is not available on Openvz systems

I guess you have no experience about a cloud hosting system?

Cloud Linux has nothing related to cloud computing technology. It is an OS with good features for shared hosting environment.

well i have 11 years in the web hosting industry i know a fair bit about the hosting industry and if you read many forums cloud hosting is mentioned on many of them of just a glorified dedicated hosting system (marketing gimmick) which that is all it is plain and simple.

With all respects, working long time in hosting industry doesn't mean you know about cloud hosting, or you know everything in this field. Cloud computing is much different than a dedicated server, especially with its stability and scalability.

I would love to hear how you expand service for a customer immediately, or within few minutes, from 4 cores CPU system with 8GB RAM to 32 cores CPU with 128GB RAM, or even more?

Thanks.

From what I understand my host sells me my reseller hosting is on a cloud server. I use CloudFlare as a selling point for my service and WP installs. Helps with the load, and that's a CDN system or cloud. (i think! )

Anyhow, hope that helps.

-Pat