A cloud hosting service means that every single part of your world-wide web presence will be maintained by an independent server. For example, your files and databases will be maintained by separate machines and since just a single type of processes will run on a server, each machine will perform better and will use its resources to the fullest. Whether you'll get a genuine cloud service or not also depends on the control panel that you will use to handle your account. As most control panels are designed to operate on a single server, they can't work on a cloud platform regardless of what a given Internet hosting provider may advertise. In case one service stops responding, the whole server may go down, so your Internet sites will not be accessible. That's why you should check what service you will actually receive in case you are looking for cloud hosting before you order anything.