Cloud Hosting is considered cheaper than VPS Hosting simply because with VPS you are guaranteed a portion of a physical server. The portion sizes and resources are only divided up among a few clients per server.
Therefore, you have access to much more server capacity than possibly on a Cloud Hosting plan, which is usually run on a scaling price plan. Meaning the more you use the more you pay, but also the less you use the less you pay.
In addition, Cloud Hosting plans can normally host hundreds or even thousands of websites throughout data centers that are leased by your Web Hosting Provider.
Web Hosting Providers may have their own Data Centers or lease out space in other Data Centers. Many times a combination of the two depending on how large the Web Hosting Provider is.
So according to economies of scale the more clients they get the cheaper they can provide their Cloud Housing Services. Whereas with a VPS, again they are limited to the amount of space they can portion out on one single server.
What is the difference between VPS and a Dedicated Server?
A Dedicated Server is an entire physical machine or server. A VPS is a “Virtual Private Server” that literally rests on top of a dedicated physical server.
As I’ve mentioned above, with a VPS you’re literally renting a certain amount of space on a Dedicated Server. You’re not renting the whole server.
Is the Cloud a physical Server?
The “Cloud” is not one physical server, but many physical servers in one data center.
Does the Cloud ever go down?
The Cloud rarely goes down. Although Cloud Data Centers host many physical servers, there is always a possibility of one of those servers going down, though it’s a very rare occasion where all the servers in a particular cloud data center go down at the same time.
However, there was one such instance that happened in the news recently here, “CHI (Chicago) Data Center Outage Overview”. This was when a whole data center actually went down. It was news because this rarely happens.
