A large amount of surveillance videos and images need sufficient storage. In this article, an architecture of cloud-based surveillance systems and its modules will be designed, the Cloud-based Visual Surveillance System (CVSS) will be implemented on a private cloud using a Virtual Machine (VM). The users are able to link their cameras to the CVSS system so that the goal of this design can be achieved. The authors' CVSS system is able to push notification messages of captured videos to receivers, and their users could receive a surveillance video along with its events. The CVSS system fully makes use of the merits of cloud computing, which make it more advanced as stated in the evaluation section of this article. The contributions of this article are to be implemented in the CVSS system with: (1) video stream input, (2) intelligent visual surveillance, (3) real-time video transcoding and storage, (4) message pushing and media streaming output.