Agreed. Most providers appear to simply slap on the "Cloud" sticker to whatever VPS solution they were providing earlier with absolutely no change in features.

Agreed. Most providers appear to simply slap on the "Cloud" sticker to whatever VPS solution they were providing earlier with absolutely no change in features. These are the features that I believe should be present in any provider that claim themselves to be cloud providers: 1. Ability to scale up or down instances with change in demand. 2. Absolutely zero machine agnostic. I really should be bothered whether I am running a linux/windows/lego machine. 3. Auto configuration and notification - Leave little configuration to me so that I can concentrate more on the stuff I like. But, please do notify me in case the whole system burns down. 4. Easily available APIs that are globally used by all - a user account management, cache management, web UI framework etc. If you see, there are only a few couple of sites (Google App Engine, Heroku et al.) that satisfy these conditions. Rest all are VPS wolfs on Cloud sheep suits.