If you have any previous experience with website hosting, which I'll refer to as traditional hosting, you're probably pretty familiar with the process of using FTP to upload your web files to your hosting provider. With traditional web hosting, service providers typically offer shared space to every user, each configured with their own public folder that houses the web files. In a scenario like this, every customer hosts the same kind of website, and their files are all stored and served from a single web server.

Traditional web hosting is fairly inexpensive because a single web server can host literally hundreds, if not thousands, of individual websites. Scaling is typically a problem with traditional hosting because if your website demanded more power, it would need to be moved to another server (with more hardware) and could experience potential downtime during this move. As a side effect, if a website on the same server as your own is being particularly demanding of the hardware, every site on that server could suffer.

With cloud-based hosting, every instance of a website or service is hosted on its own Virtual Private Server (VPS). When a customer uploads a copy of their website, that website is running in its own isolated environment, and the environment is specifically designed to run only that website. Virtual private servers are instances of a server, typically all running simultaneously on the same hardware. Due to its isolated nature, a VPS scales very well because settings simply need to be changed for hardware allocation, and the server restarts. If your VPS is hosted on the same hardware as others, and they are experiencing high-volume spikes, your website will not suffer because of the isolated nature of the VPS.