When you say "no" to cloud hosting in the same sentence as you recommend buying a VPS in the cloud... it's odd.
“Cloud” tends to assume elasticity, pay by minute, managed software services, etc.
“On the internet” isn’t cloud automatically
Others would define a cloud server as any server that someone else owns and you don't have physical access to it.
The main point I was making was figure out hosting later after figuring out the product/market fit.