Cloud hosting means your site runs on a virtualised slice of a large pool of physical servers, provisioned on demand, rather than on a single dedicated machine or a shared partition. In practice this means better resilience, easier scaling and โ usually โ a different pricing model.
How cloud hosting works
A cloud provider (AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode) runs enormous fleets of physical servers. Your site runs inside a virtual machine (or container) on top of that fleet. If a physical server fails, your VM is rebuilt on another one โ usually within seconds.
Pricing models
Pure cloud is usage-based: you pay for CPU, RAM, storage and bandwidth. Managed cloud services like Cloudways bundle those into a fixed monthly instance price. Serverless (Vercel, Cloudflare) prices per request or invocation.
When cloud beats shared
Choose cloud once your traffic is variable, once you need object caching and once you have multiple sites you want to consolidate onto one server. Below that, shared is more cost-effective.
When cloud is overkill
For a single small site with steady traffic and no developer resources, cloud adds complexity without payoff. Managed shared hosting is the right answer.
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Frequently asked questions
Is cloud hosting the same as VPS?
A VPS is one implementation of cloud hosting โ a virtual machine on a physical server. 'Cloud' usually implies additional resilience and provisioning features on top.
Does cloud hosting cost more than shared?
Entry-level cloud is 2โ4ร the cost of budget shared hosting but delivers meaningfully more capability.
Can I run WordPress on cloud hosting?
Yes โ either via a managed layer like Cloudways or by installing it yourself on a DigitalOcean or Vultr instance.
Is cloud hosting more secure?
The infrastructure is; the application is only as secure as you make it. Cloud reduces some attack surface but adds others.
What about serverless hosting?
Serverless (Vercel, Cloudflare Pages/Workers) is a specialised subset of cloud that's excellent for JavaScript apps and static sites but a poor fit for classic PHP applications like WordPress.