Provider choice vs fixed infrastructure: Some cloud hosts let customers choose their underlying provider (AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean), while others run on a single fixed provider pre-configured for the customer.

Configuration responsibility: Cloud hosting ranges from fully self-managed (you configure everything) to fully managed (the host handles server configuration entirely) — this affects both cost and the technical expertise required.

It’s also worth asking what happens specifically during a traffic spike on a neighboring account, if the host uses any form of shared infrastructure. A vague or evasive answer to this question is itself informative — a host confident in genuine per-site isolation should be able to explain exactly why a neighbor’s spike can’t affect your site’s performance, in concrete technical terms rather than reassuring generalities.

Reading a host’s own technical documentation, rather than relying solely on marketing pages, often reveals these architectural details more clearly. Hosts genuinely built around isolation tend to describe their container or virtualization model specifically, while hosts using the term more loosely often stick to vaguer language about “cloud-powered performance” without architectural specifics.