What is the distinction between a Cloud based host and a VPS? I talked to a Rackspace Cloud sales person for around 45 minutes and never came to a real conclusion on this. So, to elaborate on my question a bit -- what benefits might a "cloud" server provide me versus a VPS provider such as Linode and vice versa -- what benefits would a VPS provide over a cloud provider?

From what I've been able to ascertain, when you host on a cloud (with Rackspace Cloud) you get a instance of Linux in which you install software and such (a LAMP, for instance). From what I can figure, if the instance is running, I am charged and the pricing on Rackspace (according to what I understood from the sales rep) comes out to about $20 a month.... I was thinking a cloud customer pays per processing hours -- so if your app just sits there, no charges are incurred. Does one not pay of the cloud instance is shut down, perhaps?

A similar questions to what I'm asking but not exactly it:

• Understanding: cloud-server, cloud-hosting, cloud-computing, the cloud
• What is the difference between vps and cloud hosting