Sorry if you've seen me say the same thing in other forums but this is something that has to be said. Cloud Services & Cloud Hosting are NOT the same thing
Cloud Hosting = Shared Hosting. Both services you receive run on shared resources.
Some would say no, cloud is supposed to be clustered unlike Shared hosting. Well, if you are running shared hosting without clustering to begin with, then it is not really professional hosting, is it? It is highly irresponsible to not cluster your shared hosting environment.
Unless you have customized versions of cPanel running like we do, every provider that offers cPanel is running on a single server. cPanel does not support full system clustering as of today. Any provider whether cloud or shared, if the control panel is cPanel, you are essentially on a single server, period. They might have multiple servers but your account will always remain on one server. Unless of course they have a custom clustered cPanel.
Now then you would ask what is cloud then? Well, just because you are on a single server does not mean there is no backend redundancy built in. That's the idea of cloud compared to physical machines is that whatever setup you have, there is different levels of redundancy built in so that even if something fails you either have a fail-over component available or you can recover quickly from your earlier snapshots/backups.
If I may elaborate on our own setup a bit. We are completely built on top of AWS, so technically even if we did nothing additional, by definition the service is already "cloud" enabled. However, unlike a regular setup, what is different is that components are separated as much as possible. So, there is load balancers before the main server, the DB is separate from the web server, the HDD is obviously outside the main server hardware etc. So, as you can see, at this time we can claim to be cloud hosting because almost every component of the server is independent of each other and even if something fails, there is always redundancy that can quickly step in to save the day.
So again, there is really no difference in the type of service you get, they are still the same cPanel hosting accounts with the same type of disk & bandwidth / cpu & memory limitations. What is different is the underlying setup. Although shared hosters are also supposed to have clustering and multiple levels of redundancy built in, unfortunately most of them are setup on a single server with disk, DB, DNS, routing everything running out of a single box unlike the cloud where components are distributed.
Coming to cloud services like the ones AWS, Azure, DO offer, they are offering you resources on the cloud. It is up to you how you use them. If you're just using a single machine with a built in ephemeral storage and no redundancy, then you basically have undone cloud from what those providers have offered you. So, cloud as a service gives you limitless possibilities of highly available redundant architectures to ensure zero downtime, but when you combine them to run a service, if you don't do them the cloud way, it will just turn out to be your regular setup.
