It\'s often thought that a Cloud server and a VPS are basically the same since they both have the same objective: to run a virtual machine.

VPS

VPS or Private Server is a virtual machine that uses KVM or LXC virtualization technologies, or even OpenVZ, Linux VServer, or FreeBSD Jail. Essentially, they are server partitions that allow you to obtain the qualities of a server while having exclusive and secure access to your data.

Cloud

Cloud service, which is often misused by other companies in Chile, is an abstraction service based on physical hardware operating through a public and a private cloud, distributing the service across a network of nodes that allow for different (but not necessarily greater) levels of stability.

Costs

While operating costs are fixed in a VPS, in a Cloud they are usually variable depending on data consumption. It seems more convenient to pay for what you consume, but the cost will always be higher compared to a traditional VPS since the abstraction service is more expensive and prices can be easily managed. In my experience, projects that can be hosted on a VPS for CLP$50,000 can cost around CLP$250,000 in a Cloud service. This is without considering that with a national service you can recover the VAT since it is invoiced as a product in the first case.

On Fault Tolerance

It is often stated that cloud servers are fault-tolerant, while a VPS is not. The argument that a cloud service is fault-tolerant is based on the premise that, being abstracted, if one server fails, the cloud will tend to use other nodes and bypass the problem, which is not entirely true. For example, a company as reliable as Apple experienced a seven-hour outage on May 20, 2015, affecting Apple iCloud, email, and other cloud services such as iCloud Drive, Documents, etc. Within the range of problems a system can have, most are not related to the hardware itself (though this is not exclusive), but rather to software misuse, maintenance, and updates. Our servers have RAID (a redundant array of independent disks), which provides greater data security by maintaining a backup that allows us to address hardware-related problems.

Virtualization

To write this article, I researched extensively, and amidst the differences and similarities, it seems everyone concludes that a key advantage of Cloud is virtualization using KVM, which improves physical performance and avoids sharing loads that could impact your application\'s performance due to neighboring systems. In truth, in both services, both SSD VPS and Cloud, it\'s possible to virtualize using KVM to operate under stable resource availability parameters. It\'s also claimed that VPSs cannot have swap space, which is untrue. Both LXC and KVM virtualizations can have swap memory to reduce the load on RAM, obviously depending on the provider. In our case, it does.

Security

In itself, whether Cloud or VPS, security is not an absolute criterion and will always be determined by its use, from how the firewall is configured to infrastructure issues. Generally speaking, cloud services, being distributed across a network, are more likely to be vulnerable to attack. Ideally, you should consult resources to make an informed decision regarding security policies and contingency plans with each hosting, VPS, or server provider.

Response Times

Being a distributed network, response times are slower because more variables are involved, such as internet speed and the inherent latency of sending and receiving packets between servers. In this post, I don\'t intend to advocate for VPS services, as the advancement in business processes enabled by cloud services is undeniable. However, when seeking information to understand the current landscape and make an impartial comparison, the bias caused by a lack of understanding of a more complex technology is evident. Both services have pros and cons, which I would like to explore further in the future.

References

1. Kyocera`