Advantages of Cloud Server over Standard Hosting Server:Cloud server is nothing but the virtual server runs on cloud computing environment. Cloud server works like the physical server and can be controlled through administrator. It can be called as Virtual Dedicated Servers (VDS). There are various advantages of cloud server over the standard hosting servers.

Scalability:

On Cloud platform you can customize hardware selection appropriate for your application. Eg. Your application may need a small CPU but with high storage or something similar. But in standard hosting servers you may not have an option to choose what exactly you want, rather forced to choose a pre-defined configuration.

Elasticity:

As cloud is highly scalable you can increase or decrease the hardware needs depending high/low traffic to your application. So, no need to pay unnecessarily for a fixed hosting plan.

Run what you want:

On cloud hosting you can choose which Operating system you want to run. You can customize the OS as your requirement. But in standard hosting plan, this option is not available.

Down time:

On cloud hosting chances of downtime is very remote as multiple servers are used. In case one server goes down the others takes take care of it and virtually there is no down-time as such. But in standard hosting if a server goes down then it takes time to resume.

Control Services:

On cloud hosting you can control your cloud services by the API or from the web-console. Means you can start, stop, increase or decrease any service through API. This feature is not available on standard hosting server.

Costing:

On standard hosting we have to choose a plan for ours hosting on a periodical basis (week/ month/year), which is a fixed cost. But in Cloud, just pay as you actual consume. So, cloud based hosting is cost-effective than standard hosting server.

Private/Public:

There are several OpenSource apps available to configure cloud environment. You can setup your own private cloud using cloud apps Cloudstack, Openstack and Eucalyptus. Also you can use public cloud for you application hosting. Eg: AWS, Rackspace, Linode etc.