Cloud has become a broad term used to describe various products and services, which is supposed to be utilizing the distributed computing model. Strictly speaking “Cloud Server” is just a virtualized computer instance, a Virtual Private Server. However the term “Cloud” should mean that a “Cloud Server” is a computing instance created on top of an IT infrastructure in which the processing power (processing nodes) – CPU and RAM for example – reside on different physical machines than the data storage (SAN or storage nodes).

Some companies define “Cloud Server” for example as “on-demand virtual machine, created to deliver customizable performance and reliability”, although this is pretty much marketeer’s language. Please also be advised that billing a any virtual server hosting service (whatever it is labeled) on per minutes, per hour or per day basis doesn’t make it “Cloud”. What makes it a “Cloud Server” is the ability to scale up the allocated computing resources on demand.

To understand term “Cloud Hosting”, please read article “What does a Cloud Hosting Mean?“

The terms “Shared Cloud” and “Shared Cloud Hosting” are not very different from Cloud Hosting. They also refer to an Internet Hosting service delivered from a group of servers. The term Shared Cloud Hosting (Shared Vloud) is not  precisely defined yet. However, a “Shared Cloud Hosting” could be considered a service delivered from a computer system in which the computing resources (processing resources) are distributed. To be considered as “Shared” any Cloud hosting service must be powered by a software platform which does not create isolated virtual instances. In a Shared Cloud, all data resides in a shared storage system or network (shared pool). Cloud accounts (name based or IP based virtual hosting) share the computing resources of all servers part of the system.

Cloud Hosting is a Internet hosting service delivered from a Cloud computing generation IT infrastructure. Cloud computing term generally refers to a systems which combine the computing resources of a number of machines in order to provide High Availability, ability to scale up and down the services and more flexibility to the users.

The term Cloud Hosting can be also associated with another one – Clustered hosting. Despite that as of May 2011 the term Cloud Hosting is pretty broad term which is not precisely defined yet, we can consider any hosting service as a “Cloud” if it is delivered from a fully-redundant, multi-server system, in which the resources are dynamically scalable and often virtualized.