Basically hosting and cloud is same thing and both will work for you. Let's see what's diffrent on hosting vs cloud  

Updates

Openclassify realeses new version everyweek. You'll get updates automatically on cloud. You need to it manually on your server. 

Support

Support and education is included with cloud packages. We do not offer technical support for your servers for free. You can get support package seperatly. 

Translations

When you changed translations files it'll automatically published on cloud. You need to it manually on your server. 

Phpmyadmin and Database Access

We provide database and phpmyadmin access on cloud. 

File System Access

In professional projects nobody (really nobody) access to server until there is incident.  You need to send to code first to GIT (Github, Gitlab) then we approved it'll published on server automatically. 

We do NOT provide file system access on our cloud services because even we do not access the system. Everything is done by Jenkins and AWS (Amazon) by automation. If you access production server filesystem you wont be sure your files security. Maybe your files changed by someone else? With automation we're sure that all files are original. Also you can make your chages on GIT and you can upload to cloud.

You can always start with cloud and switch on hosting or server anytime. We suggest to start with cloud.