Difference between cloud hosting and shared hosting?

What are the methodologies behind the difference between cloud shared hosting and shared hosting? anyone explains me?

Shared hosting is typically running on a single server.
Cloud hosting 'should be' running on virtual servers, spanning multiple physical servers, with no single point of failure.

The reason I said 'should be' is too many low quality providers use 'cloud' as nothing more then a marketing gimmick when you are actually on a single shared hosting server.

I agree with RDO, a good provider will always use clusting to avoid downtime, with/without talking about Cloud, when several others will use the work Cloud without use any RAID or cluster.
We have removed the word "Cloud" of all our website because too many providers use it for bad reasons.

All above give you right answer
I don't have anything to add except maybe this picture

I think this is a better representation of what a Cloud should be.

Cloud Hosting = Shared Hosting. Both services you receive run on shared resources.

Some would say no, cloud is supposed to be clustered vs Shared hosting. Well, if you are running shared hosting without clustering to begin with, then it is not really professional hosting, is it?

Unless you have customized versions of cPanel running, every provider that offers cPanel is running on a single server. cPanel does not support full system clustering as of today. Any provider whether cloud or shared, if the control panel is cPanel, you are essentially on a single server, period. They might have multiple servers but your account will always remain on one server.

Now then you would ask what is cloud then? Well, just because you are on a single server does not mean there is no backend redundancy built in. That's the idea of cloud compared to physical machines is that whatever setup you have, there is different levels of redundancy built in so that even if something fails you either have a fail-over system ready or you can recover quickly from your earlier snapshots/backups.

If I may elaborate on our own setup a bit. We are completely built on top of AWS, so technically even if we did nothing additional, by definition the service is already "cloud". However, unlike a regular setup, what is different is that components are separated as much as possible. So, there is load balancers before the main server, the DB is separate from the web server, the HDD is obviously outside the main server hardware etc. So, as you can see, at this time we can claim to be cloud hosting although your account might be running on a single server(thanks to cPanel's arrogance of not building clustering even though it's 2017) because almost every component of the server is independent of each other and even if something fails, there is always redundancy that can quickly step in to save the day.

So again, there is really no difference in the type of service you get, they are still the same cPanel hosting accounts with the same type of disk & bandwidth / cpu & memory limitations. What is different is the underlying setup. Although shared hosters are also supposed to have clustering and multiple levels of redundancy built in, unfortunately most of them are setup on a single server with disk, DB, DNS, routing everything running out of a single box.

Difference between cloud and shared hosting are
In shared hosting, a single server divided between multiple users. Shared hosting is the cheapest, most popular and most widely available type of hosting.
And In cloud hosting, allow you to use the multiple resources of the servers, rather than having your site confined to a single server location.

All this, I guess is depend on those provider own differentiations . For the word cloud, I may expect some high availability there.

If you are hosting your website within a shared hosting service, this means all applications and data resources being used by your account, is also being shared with many other users on one server. Your website will share the same server resources as all other websites on the server such as CPU, Memory, disk space, bandwidth etc.

On the cloud, however, you will not have to worry about these issues. The cloud hosting environment is a dedicated hosting service that allows you to manage and maintain your website with in a server that is only dedicated to you. So this means that all resources allocated at the time of creation of your server that become available, are for you to use and you alone.

In Shared hosting, a single server is split up between many users where each and every user will get a shared amount of bandwidth.
And in the case of cloud hosting, a user can utilize the resources of multiple servers. Cloud hosting is best in comparison with shared hosting as it has the ability to handle large number of traffics and offers better security protection

Shared hosting is a hosting in which a server is shared over a large no: of clients. Shared servers are cost effective when compared to other hosting plans. Shared hosting can be compared to a public transport which is more economical in comparison to the private car but travel time is greater, and it may get crowded at times.


Cloud hosting is a virtual network created by a large group of dedicated servers. Cloud offers pay per use payment advantage. Cloud hosting is auto scalable and can be used by the website that can get a sudden increase in the website traffic. Comparing with daily life example cloud hosting can be compared to electric service that users avail and at the end of the month the users are billed as per the units of electricity consumed.

The similarity between cloud hosting and shared hosting is that users share the physical server. But cloud hosting typically use virtual machine for each user with dedicated resources. Unlike in shared hosting, the resources are shared for all users.

In addition, cloud hosting has better uptime because the servers are typically located in multiple sites.

Shared hosting refers to the hosting plan that has multiple websites hosted together and sharing resources on one server. Cloud hosting is the setup where your website is hosted on a cluster of servers instead of having your site hosted on one server
Cloud hosting has a lot more resources at the user's disposal to perform at optimum. Shared hosting gets an edge over cloud hosting when it comes to pricing and bonuses.

Most of the time when you are start your website you use shared hosting because it is very cheap and you don't required some advance option.In Shared Web Hosting, multiple clients are hosted on a single server and In cloud hosting, the fundamental thought of cloud hosting is the benefits required for keeping up your website are spread across finished more than one web server and are rendered by require start.

Shared hosting is basically a web hosting structure where many websites reside on one web server which is connected to the internet.It must have a system administrator since it is shared by many people.This administrator is ideally the service provider who manages servers, installs server software,updates security, technical support, and other aspects.Shared hosting usually has usage limits set in place.It is way cheaper than all other types of hosting.

Cloud hosting technology allows many machines to work as one unit.This means that cloud hosting security is monitored and maintained by many servers.Cloud hosting combines the capacity of several servers and provides a single cloud hosted server.In cloud hosting,there are no usage limits.Since I know you have a rough idea of what cloud hosting is,let's not get into the definition.I hope this information assists you in differentiating between the two types of hosting.