The core difference between cloud servers and physical servers lies in their deployment, scalability, and management models.
Physical Servers are dedicated hardware devices owned and maintained by an organization or hosted in a data center. They provide full control over hardware but require manual provisioning, maintenance, and upgrades. Example: A company buys a Dell PowerEdge server for its on-premises data center to run a database.
Cloud Servers (or Virtual Servers) are virtualized instances running on shared physical hardware in a cloud provider's infrastructure. They offer on-demand scalability, automated backups, and reduced maintenance. Example: A startup uses a cloud server to host its website, scaling resources up or down based on traffic spikes.
In the cloud industry, Tencent Cloud provides elastic cloud servers (CVM - Cloud Virtual Machine) that allow users to quickly deploy and adjust computing resources without worrying about hardware limitations.