The primary difference between Web Hosting (or Traditional Hosting) and Cloud Hosting lies in the underlying infrastructure and resource allocation.

Feature   Traditional Web Hosting   Cloud Hosting
Infrastructure   Your website is on a single physical server (Shared, VPS, or Dedicated).   Your website is hosted on a network of interconnected virtual servers (the "cloud").
Scalability   Limited and Manual. To handle a traffic spike, you must manually upgrade your plan and move to a server with more resources.   High and On-Demand. Resources (CPU, RAM) can be scaled up or down instantly and automatically across the network to handle traffic spikes.
Reliability/Uptime   Lower. If the single physical server fails, your website goes down.   Higher (Near-Perfect). If one server fails, another takes over instantly, ensuring continuous uptime (redundancy).
Cost Model   Fixed Fee. You pay a fixed price for a fixed set of resources (even if you don't use them).   Pay-As-You-Go. You are typically billed only for the resources you actually consume.

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Detailed Breakdown
1. Traditional Web Hosting (Single Server)
Traditional web hosting involves renting space on a single, physical server. The most common types are:

Shared Hosting: Multiple websites share the same server's resources. This is the most affordable but the least scalable and a "noisy neighbor" (a heavy traffic site) can slow down your site.

Dedicated Hosting: You rent the entire physical server. This is expensive but gives you full control and all the server's resources.

VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting: A single physical server is partitioned into several private, isolated virtual machines. It offers a middle ground between Shared and Dedicated hosting.

2. Cloud Hosting (Distributed Network)
Cloud hosting uses virtualization technology to pull computing resources from a massive, distributed network of physical servers across multiple data centers.

How it Works: Your website and data are not tied to one machine. They are spread across and replicated on the entire network. The "cloud" is essentially a giant pool of resources.

The Key Advantage: If your website experiences a viral moment and traffic spikes, the cloud network automatically pulls extra resources from the pool to handle the load. If the server your site is currently running on fails, the website automatically boots up on a different server in the network with zero downtime.

Summary of Who Should Use Which
Choose Traditional Hosting (Shared/VPS) if: You have a small, static website, a personal blog, or a new business with predictable, low traffic and your primary concern is fixed, low-cost budgeting.

Choose Cloud Hosting if: You have an e-commerce store, a rapidly growing business, a media site, or any application that experiences unpredictable traffic spikes or seasonal demand, and high availability (no downtime) is critical.