The terms “Shared Cloud” and “Shared Cloud Hosting” are not very different from Cloud Hosting. They also refer to an Internet Hosting service delivered from a group of servers. The term Shared Cloud Hosting (Shared Vloud) is not  precisely defined yet. However, a “Shared Cloud Hosting” could be considered a service delivered from a computer system in which the computing resources (processing resources) are distributed. To be considered as “Shared” any Cloud hosting service must be powered by a software platform which does not create isolated virtual instances. In a Shared Cloud, all data resides in a shared storage system or network (shared pool). Cloud accounts (name based or IP based virtual hosting) share the computing resources of all servers part of the system.

Cloud has become a broad term used to describe various products and services, which is supposed to be utilizing the distributed computing model. Strictly speaking “Cloud Server” is just a virtualized computer instance, a Virtual Private Server. However the term “Cloud” should mean that a “Cloud Server” is a computing instance created on top of an IT infrastructure in which the processing power (processing nodes) – CPU and RAM for example – reside on different physical machines than the data storage (SAN or storage nodes).

Some companies define “Cloud Server” for example as “on-demand virtual machine, created to deliver customizable performance and reliability”, although this is pretty much marketeer’s language. Please also be advised that billing a any virtual server hosting service (whatever it is labeled) on per minutes, per hour or per day basis doesn’t make it “Cloud”. What makes it a “Cloud Server” is the ability to scale up the allocated computing resources on demand.

To understand term “Cloud Hosting”, please read article “What does a Cloud Hosting Mean?“