It could be their own cloud. I refer to my VPSes as "the cloud" even though that's still self-hosting. My "cloud storage" would just be a 10TB storage VPS I've got.
That part of this comic really stuck out like a sore thumb. I can't tell if it's an oversight, a comment about the challenges of self-hosting, or subtle mockery of self-hosting hypocrisy.
Broadly, "the cloud" is just someone else's computer. VPSes still fall into that definition. A lot of VPS providers describe themselves as "cloud" now too (eg one of the main hosts I use, HostHatch, describes themselves that way on their site).
If a single AWS EC2 or Lightsail server (which is essentially just a VPS in one region) is considered to be "in the cloud", why not a much cheaper, more powerful server with a different provider?
I broadly agree that "cloud" has an awful lot of marketing fluff to it, as with many previous buzzwords in information technology.
However, I also think that there was legitimately a shift from a point in time where one got a physical box assigned to them to the point where VPSes started being a thing to something like AWS. A user really did become increasingly-decoupled from the actual physical hardware.
With a physical server, I care about the actual physical aspects of the machine.
With a VPS, I still have "a VPS". It's virtualized, yeah, but I don't normally deal with them dynamically.
With something like AWS, I'm thinking more in terms of spinning up and spinning down instances when needed.
I think that it's reasonable to want to describe that increasing abstraction in some way.
Is it a fundamental game-changer? In general, I don't think so. But was there a shift? Yeah, I think so.
And there might legitimately be some companies for which that is a game-changer, where the cost-efficiencies of being able to scale up dynamically to handle peak load on a service are so important that it permits their service to be viable at all.
My case is a variant of that - I used to host on a VPS, but the storage available was extremely expensive for, say, more than 16 GB. Tired of having to trim data literally daily, I went and purchased a home server with all the storage I would need. The problem? My home internet, being residential, is behind CG-NAT (not even a dynamic IP!), and that means renting a (much cheaper) VPS solely to expose my server to the open internet with a static IP.
For exposing your server to the internet, a $10/year 512MB RAM VPS would be more than enough. You can also get VPSes with way more storage for a reasonable price, especially during Black Friday. The VPS I'm hosting Lemmy and Mastodon on has 99GB disk space and is only $33/year, but that was part of a limited sale.