Is your new provider saying it's a dedicated server, or a cloud dedicated server? I'm always skeptical when I see or hear about the cloud. The word "cloud" to any hosting product within the web hosting industry, has hundred of different definitions. Given the ambiguity of "cloud hosting" especially since there isn't really an agreed upon definition of what "cloud" is, I'm going to make the assumption that you are referring to a "cloud server", whereas you get resources similar to a dedicated server, but within the cloud infrastructure allowing you to leverage SANs, fail over, etc.If that is the case, then.. a cloud server will appear and act just like a normal dedicated server, allowing you to install cPanel, run crons, etc. If you are referring to some other cloud hosting type, you'll need to provide more information before anyone here will be able to offer you any guidance.
Under ideal circumstances a server in cloud hosting is going to instantly stay in sync with it's other cloud instances in other datacenters. Meaning that if one instances or resource goes down, there are others to back it up. The more instances you have, the more protected you are from outages but it's also the more expensive things become. I'm not sure on the price you were offered of the specs you had mentioned, just know that from vendor to vendor the word "cloud" will mean different things. Primarily for marketing purposes. The truth is that most hosting solutions are cloud, and if you study the history of clouding computing starting with AWS (which really took ownership of that space as an attempt for Amazon to be recognized as a technology company and not simply as another retailer,) their solution was simply a coshare/colocation offering. Rackspace is one of the few companies that has pioneer the evolution of cloud with their openstack solution. Most clients do not see the difference between them as long as they work the same way for their end user needs. Much the same as a virtual or hybrid server compared to a bare metal, etc.. For 99% of the end users, they are buying on cost and function. The rest of that is semantics that only network admins care about.
Think your public email account. Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook or even your domain names email account. They all can be considered as "cloud" emails. Access from anywhere, reliable, auto-scaling. Heck, you can be looking for
The original use of the term 'cloud' was highly available, highly redundant infrastructure. Most of the time if a company is decently well known, it isn't considered as "false advertising" , and there are true cloud providers out there, but they tend to be more expensive. You won't find many budget "true cloud" providers but these days "cloud" has just been diluted, as many new providers are using it interchangeably with all their products.
