What is the difference between cloud hosting and dedicated server?

Answer 1

Distance, probably.  However, some cloud services also restrict which protocols you can use.

A dedicated in-house network will probably allow Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, which is the Windows standard file-share and print-share protocol.  It will also support FTP, SMTP, NTP, HTTP, and a raft of other alphabet soup combinations.  The networks will probably be Ethernet-based Local Area Networks, which tend to be faster and more reliable than other network types.

Cloud-based storage, because of the distance involved, tends to not be so reliable for some of those networks.  The protocols are extremely sensitive to network "drops" during transmission.  Cloud servers over Wide Area Networks might only allow FTP variants, which means you can transfer whole files - but without SMB, you cannot remotely share files simultaneously with other users.