Cloud hosting explained
"Cloud hosting" is a marketing umbrella covering everything from a managed WordPress site to a hand-built Kubernetes cluster. Here's what it actually means when you're buying — and how the pricing catches people out.
What cloud actually gives you
- • Elasticity. Add or remove capacity in seconds, not weeks. Auto-scaling means you don't over-provision for the worst hour.
- • Managed services. Databases, object storage, queues and caches you don't have to run yourself.
- • Redundancy by default. Multi-AZ storage, snapshots, and live migration off failing hardware.
- • Pay-as-you-go. You pay per hour (or per second) — great for spiky workloads, bad if you leave things running.
The pricing gotchas nobody warns you about
Egress bandwidth
Data leaving the cloud is where bills go feral. The big three charge $0.08–$0.12 per GB out to the internet. A viral image on a static site can cost more than the server itself. Look for hosts with generous or free egress, or park static assets on a CDN.
- • Snapshot storage — pennies per GB, but nobody deletes old ones.
- • Inter-AZ traffic — replication across availability zones costs money.
- • Load balancer per-hour fees — even when nothing is passing through.
- • NAT gateway hours — sneaky and cumulative.
- • API request pricing on object storage (S3 and equivalents).
Picking a region
The rule is simple: pick the region closest to your visitors, not closest to you. Every 1000km of fibre adds roughly 10ms of round-trip latency, and pages start feeling sluggish above 100ms server response.
- Mostly EU visitors → Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Paris or London.
- Mostly US visitors → an east-coast region for the population weight.
- Global audience → pick where your database lives, and put a CDN in front for static assets.
Cloud vs VPS — the honest answer
A modern VPS from a good host runs on the same virtualisation stack as a "cloud" instance. The real differences are billing model, scaling APIs, and the ecosystem of managed services around it. If you don't need to auto-scale and you don't need managed Postgres/Redis/queues, a VPS with a fixed monthly price will almost always be cheaper and simpler.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between cloud hosting and a VPS?
Technically they often run on the same virtualisation stack. In practice, cloud means per-second billing, APIs for auto-scaling, and a big menu of managed services (Postgres, Redis, queues, object storage). A VPS is a fixed-price virtual machine — cheaper and simpler if you don't need any of that.
Is cloud hosting cheaper than dedicated?
Only for spiky or short-lived workloads. Any service running 24/7 at high load is typically 3–5× more expensive on the big three clouds than on an equivalent dedicated box.
Why did my cloud bill suddenly triple?
Almost always one of: egress bandwidth (data leaving the cloud at $0.08–$0.12/GB), forgotten snapshots, load-balancer or NAT-gateway hours, or object-storage API request pricing. Set a budget alert and audit egress first.
Which cloud region should I pick?
The one closest to the majority of your visitors, not closest to you. Every 1000km adds roughly 10ms of round-trip latency, and pages start feeling sluggish above 100ms TTFB. Put a CDN in front for static assets so region matters less.
Do I need Kubernetes to use cloud hosting?
No. Most websites do fine with a single cloud VM, or a managed platform (Render, Fly, Cloudflare Pages, Vercel). Kubernetes solves problems most sites don't have and adds operational overhead you'll feel every week.
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