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Minor: what's the difference between a cloud provider and a VPS provider? I could rent a VPS and do something uncloudlike with it.

I'd like to specify a budget amount, and see what the offers are at that price point. The use case is something like "I know what $20 gets me on Linode, how does that compare to $20 at the other providers?"

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To be honest I don't think there is a sharp division line between VPS or IaaS. They at least intersect. If you try to differentiate, usually you will find definitions that VPS is more like dedicated server, just that it is virtual. So they have the same pricing model - longer term (at least month), pay in advance, often not automatically provisioned. In IaaS you are are charged per actual use, usually in hour intervals. You have API to automatically create new or shut down instances when needed (scale up and down) ... and theoretically you have infinite computing resources available.

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