You get root access to a blank OS image running in a VM and can do whatever you want with it. Thats pretty much what a VPS is.

Both do provide an API for things like provisioning nodes, deploying stuff, billing, etc. That does differentiate them from low end VPS providers.

But, they do not provide any sort of "cloud app runtime" comparable to AWS or GCE.

I totally agree with that.

Well, there are some very good comments in this thread, very little to add.

All of those plans that I compare there use the same technology in the the end, KVM virtualization. The differences are in the "flexibility" and "services" that they offer in order to act more as a cloud or more as a classic VPS. But the lines are very blurred these days. You can almost achieve the same things with any of them in these kind of plans. IMHO I think that you can really start talking about clouds when you're playing in the same league as AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

cloud is just a fancy word for Virtualization.

I think virtualization is a fancy word for cloud.

Virtualisaton is the basic task you're doing, you're making a "virtual" computer. The idea of the "cloud" is more that these virtual machines are hosted in a room somewhere far away with other virtual computers there as well.

For instance, I can install VMWare and get virtualisation going on my laptop, but I wouldn't consider that the cloud. Similar, you can get bare metal computers on the cloud which aren't virtualised.

That's not strictly true, most folks agree that cloud services typically have an "on the fly" type elastic nature.

At the end of the day there exists a hypervisor... Virtualization.

Yep, afaik Amazon ec2 is still Xen.

So do VPS providers. Ask for a VPS and you'll get it in the same amount of time as EC2.

The difference is only surrounding automated deployment (cloudformation) or services that are offered (RDS)

Last I recall Linode and DigitalOcean were VPSes. They're on a single node with local storage. You can use block storage to set up network storage, but they're all VPSes.