Cloud server is nothing but the virtual server runs on cloud computing environment. Cloud server works like the physical server and can be controlled through an administrator.
It can be called as Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS). There are various advantages of cloud server over the standard hosting servers.
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Scalability:
On Cloud platform you can customize hardware selection appropriate for your application. Eg. Your application may need a small CPU but with high storage or something similar.
But in standard hosting servers you may not have an option to choose what exactly you want, rather forced to choose a pre-defined configuration.
Elasticity:
As cloud is highly scalable you can increase or decrease the hardware needs depending high/low traffic to your application. So, no need to pay unnecessarily for a fixed hosting plan.
Run what you want:
On cloud hosting, you can choose which Operating system you want to run. You can customize the OS as your requirement. But in the standard hosting plan, this option is not available.
Downtime:
On cloud hosting chances of downtime is very remote as multiple servers are used. In case one server goes down the others takes take care of it and virtually there is no down-time as such. But in standard hosting, if a server goes down then it takes time to resume.
Control Services:
On cloud hosting, you can control your cloud services by the API or from the web-console. This means you can start, stop, increase or decrease any service through API. This feature is not available on the standard hosting server.
Costing:
On standard hosting, we have to choose a plan for ours hosting on a periodical basis (week/ month/year), which is a fixed cost. But in Cloud, just pay as you actually consume. So, cloud-based hosting is cost-effective than a standard hosting server.
Private/Public:
There are several OpenSource apps available to configure the cloud environment. You can set up your own private cloud using cloud apps Cloudstack, Openstack, and Eucalyptus. Also, you can use the public cloud for your application hosting. Eg: AWS, Rackspace, Linode, etc.
