There can be difference between hosting on bare metal boxes and hosting on cloud providers.
If you are connecting different services (message queues, databases, storage, transcoding), and spinning up and down instances based on current demand and spot prices, then cloud hosting is totally different. On the other hand, if you are just renting a couple of dedicated cloud instances, then yeah - they're just (virtualized) servers.
Yeah. The problem is, "cloud" now means both of the things you described and then some. Probably the best definition corresponding to present usage of this word would be "not on localhost".
(Because yeah, if I host a Dropbox clone on my Raspberry Pi sitting on the wardrobe, I have my files "in the cloud" now.)
We need a new word for automated, dynamic allocation/deallocation/management of remote instances for various services. Something that would differentiate it from buying a VPS.
Agreed. Amongst non-technical people, 'in the cloud' just means 'somewhere on the internet'. For example, if I backup my iPhone onto iTunes on my laptop then that's not on the cloud, but if backup to iCloud then it's on the cloud.
I guess it's frustrating that cloud means quite different things depending on the context, but I guess that's true of a lot of language.
If you are connecting different services (message queues, databases, storage, transcoding), and spinning up and down instances based on current demand and spot prices, then cloud hosting is totally different. On the other hand, if you are just renting a couple of dedicated cloud instances, then yeah - they're just (virtualized) servers.