How can I know a Cloud hosting is not VPS?

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Posted by hing02, 07-01-2011, 07:54 AM
Hello, I found many of so call "Cloud" hosting plans are just VPS! I ask them what if my bandwidth excess their limit, they said I need to upgrade to other plan. What I really want is flexable...they are VPS not Cloud... I really want to find some Cloud hosting which is cheaper than Amazon...
Posted by rds100, 07-01-2011, 07:58 AM
Well, Cloud is in essence a kind of VPS with some marketing water vapour on top of it. Why exactly do you want to pay extra for the buzzword? Just find a provider that will sell you extra bandwidth when you need it and no need to call it with fancy names. Last edited by rds100; 07-01-2011 at 08:03 AM.
Posted by MikeDVB, 07-01-2011, 08:06 AM
Ask the provider to describe their cloud infrastructure, there are some key words you should be able to pick out if it's a real cloud.
Posted by Chris - Whitesystem, 07-01-2011, 08:52 PM
That's true, but it's an excellent concept, isn't it?...
Posted by tchen, 07-01-2011, 10:09 PM
... but then it is ... http://www.linode.com/api/ The main distinguishing point between a cloud and a VPS is the provisioning ability. It is an IaaS cloud in the same vein as AWS EC2, Rackspace, Voxel, and OVH.
Posted by bhavicp, 07-01-2011, 10:34 PM
I thought 'a cloud' is when a service is HA and/or has failover ability (ie SAN storage). Linode hosts VM's on local storage with no failover whatsoever.
Posted by Coolraul, 07-02-2011, 01:01 AM
Completely wrong but I understand why there is confusion. There are providers calling things cloud when they are not.
Posted by JasonD10, 07-02-2011, 01:32 PM
There is so much misinformation in this thread I don't know where to begin. Cloud is not VPS, VPS is not Cloud, but they DO have similarities just as a car does to a truck. When a truck was first introduced was it just marketing? Of course not! You could clearly see with your eyes that they had obvious differences. The only problem with Cloud, is the misinformation surrounding it. Let's make it really simple here. Cloud has location independence, increased scalability, increased reliability, increased performance, and ease of management. Let's break it down further. Location independence does not mean geographic redundancy, but that the application running on it can run on any of the physical servers or storage locations in that Cloud. VPS is tied to a single physical server. Increased scalability because of location independence. If you want to take your VPS from 1GB/RAM to 10GB/RAM your provider will probably tell you they need to migrate you to another server. Oops! With Cloud, there is no migration as it's location independent and instantly scalable. Increased reliability also again, because of location independence. When a physical server or any storage, network, etc component fails your application will self heal on other available resources. In a true cloud, there is no single point of failure on the infrastructure but there can still be a single point of failure with the application if it's just one OS. Now add in a Cloud Cluster and you are scalable beyond one physical server vertically, and horizontally. Say hello to the coveted five nine's of reliability and even geographic redundancy if your budget allows it. Increased performance? Skipping semantics the provider can take apples to apples hardware, networking, storage, etc and get better performance out of a Cloud again... due to location independence. High IO or other applications can be pinpointed and directed exactly where the provider wants them to keep performance running optimal in a Cloud. Yes, this is not directly seen by the end-user but the opposite could occur as well. A sub-par provider can ignore this, and actually make performance worse. Ease of management.. yeah, for sure. API's help of course for both providers and end users but here we are again, location independence making that management so much easier. Stand-alone servers are just commodities in a Cloud. We don't get effected or interrupted just like you wouldn't if you were to find yourself all of a sudden missing a sock. You just grab another one and move on. If you haven't noticed the trend the most important aspect of Cloud is location independence. This is the key component of what makes Cloud what it is, and what makes all other key features possible. VPS does not have this, and therefore is inferior to Cloud.
Posted by tchen, 07-02-2011, 02:13 PM
HA/Failover comes in many forms. The image-backed one we generally see is just one, and actually is one of the simplest, and somewhat limited version of it. Inclusion of which doesn't necessarily make a cloud. People who are in Amazon EC2, Linode, Rackspace, and their own DCs are building their own HA/Failover solutions from basic principles, not because its fun or cool to do, but because when you do need real availability and scalability, it has to be an application-layer implementation. SAN has its uses in legacy support but seriously, attempting to include it, or any such primitive form of HA into the definition of a 'cloud' is too narrow and would seriously be a hindrance to an industry that had already gone beyond it. Relying on fsck as your sole means for data consistency is so 10 years ago. In any case, NIST, because they're tired of dealing with wading through marketing-speak with their government charges, made a quick draft of what they think is the bare minimum when they're talking about clouds: http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/dr...definition.pdf On-demand self-service, Broad network access, Resource pooling (multi-tenant), Rapid elasticity, and Measured Service. With regard to the original topic, a VPS with SolusVM stapled on top comes close - but is still missing the rapid elasticity and self-service to varying degrees.

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