What 'cloud hosting' actually means at low end

Actually this is not my circus, not my monkeys but I keep seeing people confused so here is the truth

'Cloud' at low end means three things and none of them are real clouds

• VPS with hourly billing = 'elastic cloud' at GreenCloudVPS. Actually it is just OpenStack with a nice panel. You can not scale down below 1GB. I tried.
• 'Distributed storage' at Vultr means RAID-10 on two servers in same rack. I asked support. They said 'distributed across redundant controllers.' Not what anyone thinks.
• 'Container cloud' at Hetzner is Docker on shared KVM. No orchestration. You get port 80 and pray.

Real cloud: none of these. But for $3/month what do you expect XD

I will name names because transparency matters. I work in this industry, not my employer but similar tier.

Hetzner runs Anycast for DNS but not for compute. Their 'DDoS protected cloud' scrubs at 200Gbps at two POPs. Anything over 50Gbps to a single node gets null-routed. Filtering layers: edge ACL, then SYN proxy, then application.

Not cloud. Just VPS with a scrubbing center. Honest about it at least.