Hosting - Cloud or Dedicated

Have hosted lots of D sites before, all on dedicated servers.

I have one launching this year that will most likely be content heavy so was thinking best approach server wise.

Has anyone hosted on cloud servers before and easily able to expand HD space?

Its fine starting off on dedivated with a few TB of space, but could get filled up fairly quick and don't want to create an issue transferring to larger storage as some hosts are not able to add additional drives (or charge a fortune to do so!)

Any insight into cloud hosting D would be appreciated.

Best long term value and flexibility for high volume sites is to just run your own dedicated server at a colocation data center.

i have a custom 4U Server (32cores, 32TB Storage, 64GB RAM) and a Watchguard xtm 515 firewall with 2x 1gbps lines and 20 IPs

I pay $210/mo for rack space and unlimited bandwidth

VPS performance will depend on how many VPSes are on the same box.  If you decide to go with VPS, you need to go with a company that limits the number of VPSes they put on each physical server..

I first put Dolphin on a VPS and it kept crashing; the company offered cheap VPSes and at the time I did not know the resource requirements of Dolphin; they were overloading the physical server with too many VPSes.

I host all my D sites on a Rackspace Cloud server. Works fantastic. I pay for what I use. I can add/subtract disk space, RAM and bandwidth on the fly as needed. Used to have a dedicated server, but like this better.

 Can you tell me where is this located or what company?

@OP

You can go with a cloud provider like DigitalOcean if you see a need for adding/removing resource frequently. They are cheap and good.

Or if you need lots of it then i think you should look into aws.

I have my dedicated server at https://www.soyoustart.com/us/essential-servers/  and I love it cheap and super fast.

Question in the thread is about Cloud hosting...

Not vps or dedicated

@arcane220 - where are you getting your hosting from?

my data center is at FDC Servers

https://www.fdcservers.net/

been using them for this and corporate things, haven't had a issue in 4 years.

one thing i really like about them is they forward my IP blocks name servers to my own dns servers so i can set my PRT records and have total control over my IPs

VPS and Cloud is the same thing; referring to virtual servers.

Umm, they are similar, but not exactly the same.

http://www.vps.net/blog/2012/08/20/vps-vs-cloud-server/#.VonM5ZXSmJA

https://linode.com is similar to https://www.digitalocean.com, but they allow to downgrade as well, upgrade/downgrade is not instant, it depends on the data size on your server, from minutes and longer...

 How about my predefined values issue Alex? 

 IS that 32TB or 3x2TB...

Can't see anything near your spec on their site for anywhere around your price!

its colocation, so i own my servers and firewall, i just pay for rack space.

anyhow i have (8) 4TB WD Enterprise drives paired with a Intel RS3DC080 Raid Controller in Raid 10... So its 16TB usable. Also have a 2TB drive for backups... my members spoil me by keeping the sites amazon wishlist cleared.

we also run a few ventrilo, game, exchange, and name servers from the equipment.