Cloud is the latest buzz word in the internet community among developers, consumers and security researchers. There have been many attacks on the cloud in the recent past where the services got interrupted and consumer privacy has been compromised. Denial of Service (DoS) attacks effect the service availability to the genuine user. Customers are paying to use the cloud, so enhancing the availability of services is a paramount task for the service provider. In the presence of DoS attacks, the availability is reduced drastically. Such attacks must be detected and prevented as early as possible and the power of computational approaches can be used to do so. In the literature, machine learning techniques have been used to detect the presence of attacks. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed, where intelligent rule based feature selection and classification are performed for DoS attack detection in the cloud. The performance of the proposed system has been evaluated on an experimental cloud set up with real time DoS tools. It was observed that the proposed system achieved an accuracy of 98.46% on the experimental data for 10,000 instances with 10 fold cross-validation. By using this methodology, the service providers will be able to provide a more secure cloud environment to the customers. © 2015 KSII.