Difference between Cloud and VPS hosting

Just generally looking at Magento 1.9 hosting providers and was surprised at how cheap some are, obviously some do not offer any support, backups etc however there are quite a few which on the face of it offer more than i currently get for a third of the price and each with different options. One main one is Cloud or VPS hosting (i currently use a VPS solution) but i don't understand what the difference between Cloud and VPS hosting as i thought VPS was cloud hosting.
Can anyone enlighten me (in simple terms) what the difference is and what are the potential issues with a Magento 1.9 store?
Thanks

 

In short, the main difference between virtual private servers and cloud servers is scale.

A cloud environment allows you to more easily add more resources to your server, such as RAM, processors or even cloned copies of your server for data back-up.

Taken from https://www.rackspace.com/en-us/cloud/cloud-computing/vps

Correct me if I am wrong but with cloud you don't even need to restart an instance if you add RAM or CPU. Unlike VPS.

 

Depends on the VPS platform but we don't usually restart ours when upgrading clients. Some services running on the VPS are restarted but there's no noticeable interruption.

 

Right the major difference is how fast you can upgrade or downgrade resources, which can ultimately result in optimum usage of resources.

 

If you are running or want to run on AWS, Bitnami is a great place to start, they offer hosting and also AWS options, if you want to change the server instance type on AWS you will need to shut it down and adjust and then bring it back up.

Tim.

 

VPS is a virtual machines provided by the hosting providers, it can be used for small websites or e-commerce systems. It is similar to a physical machine, but always share the resources with other clients.

If you have lots of traffic and customers, think about the Cloud solution such as AWS, Azure. Your database, images storage, front-end are running on difference virtual instances inside the private network.

AWS also provides the VPS which is called Lightsail with reasonable price.

From technical point of view, VPS is similar to the Cloud but designed for different scale.

All these hosting providers do not optimize the performance or speed of your system or look after the system uptime. I would suggest Transfon managed hosting or cloud service for non-technical people.

 

Neither VPS (Virtual Private Server) or Cloud are restricted to one website. Both can be scaled up & down in terms of resources and they both have limits as defined by the specification of the package/price.