Are you looking for the best cloud hosting provider? If you do, then you have come to the right place.
Cloud hosting is popular among businesses right now. Even if you are not sure where you stand in terms of growth, cloud hosting can give you peace of mind when the time arises.
In this article, we will look at the best cloud hosting providers and help you make the right choice. By the end of the article, you will have a clear understanding of cloud hosting, how it works, and the things you need to know before making a choice.
However, if you are in a hurry, check out the quick comparison table for the best cloud hosting providers.
| Cloud Hosting Provider | Root access | Uptime | Lowest Price per month |
| DigitalOcean | Yes | 99.99% | $5 |
| Cloudways | Yes, depends on the choice of server | 99.98% | $10 |
| SiteGround | No | 99.99% | $80 |
| InMotion | Yes | 99.90% | $5 |
| HostGator | No | 99.98% | $4.95 |
| A2 Hosting | Yes | 99.90% | $5 |
| DreamHost | Yes | 99.96% | $4.50 |
| Microsoft Azure | Yes | 99.95% | $3.50 |
| Kamatera | Yes | 99.95% | $4 |
| Amazon AWS | Yes | 99.95% |
But, before we do, let’s explore cloud hosting.
What is Cloud Hosting?
Cloud hosting is a flexible approach when it comes to hosting your websites, services, or applications.
To explain, we first need to take a look at shared hosting.
Shared hosting works by sharing a set of resources to several sites. So, your website is granted a limited set of resources, which is shared among other sites. There is no exclusivity here. This can lead to problems if your site suddenly sees a rise in traffic. As resources are limited, the server can crash, or the site starts to load slowly.
A dedicated or virtual private server(VPS) solves the problem by providing dedicated resources depending on your requirement. But, what happens when you start getting constant visits to your site due to popularity? In those cases, even dedicated or virtual private servers(VPS) can be limiting!
Cloud hosting solves all of these!
It’s hosting method is to be flexible and use multiple servers to serve the demands of a growing site.
So, suppose your site gets a sudden traffic site. In that case, the cloud hosting provider will allocate the much-needed resources to handle the spike. This means that your website will not crash or get slow even in demanding situations. It also becomes easy to add resources to your cloud hosting plan.
Benefits of Cloud Hosting
There are many benefits to using cloud hosting services. Let’s take a look at them below:
- Performance: Your site will always be at top performance, thanks to the load balancing feature. With this, your site is stored on multiple virtual machines and actively tries to utilize resources without impacting the performance.
- Scalability: Cloud hosting has always been about scalability. This means you can use the on-demand resources according to your needs. All you need to do is add RAM, CPU, or storage when you see growth.
- Security: Cloud servers are secure as they use SSL certificate, DDoS protection, malware protection, backups, and other methods to keep your site as safe as possible.
- Flexible pricing: Cloud hosting pricing is flexible, and you only have to pay based on what you use.
- Availability: In case of cloud hosting, there is negligible downtime as resources can be re-allocated to keep your site up and running.
- Customization: Lastly, you get the benefit of complete customization. Most cloud hosting providers give you root access, which means you can tweak the server as per your needs.
Different Types of Cloud Hosting
Not all cloud hosting providers are the same. We can broadly categorize cloud hosting providers into two categories:
- Entry-level
- Enterprise Cloud Solutions
Entry-level cloud hosting is provided by traditional web hosts such as HostGator. Their cloud hosting packages are priced close to other web hosting packages. They hence are best suited for new businesses that are on a budget.
Enterprise cloud solutions are aimed at enterprises. Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS are great examples of enterprise cloud solutions.
We will try to cover both of the cloud hosting types, but our focus will mainly be on non-enterprise cloud hosting solutions.
Evaluating the Cloud Hosting Platforms
The best way to evaluate cloud hosting providers is to objectively assess their services.
We start with numbers where we compare the RAM, CPUs, Bandwidth, Root access, and Uptime. We also take a look at their support and how easy it is to upgrade your plans, i.e., flexibility.
Lastly, we also take price points into consideration.
Tips To Choose The Best Hosting Providers
Not all cloud hosting providers are the same, and that’s why you need to do your homework to pick the right cloud hosting based on your needs.
Before we start with our list of the best cloud hosting providers, let’s check out some tips on choosing the right cloud hosting provider.
- Understand your goals and requirements: It is easy to get carried away at the beginning of your project and choose a cloud hosting provider or plan that is not suited for your requirement. To overcome this, you need to outline your scope, understand your goals, and decide what’s best for you.
- Create a shortlist of cloud hosting providers: Rather than looking at one or two options, it is better to create a list of cloud hostings that fit your criteria. From there, you can narrow down to the one provider that suits you best.
- What hardware are you getting?: It is a wise choice to know how much CPU, RAM, and storage you are getting before you make the purchase. Double-check these numbers if you have to.
- Is support adequate?: Things can go wrong anytime, and that’s why you need to learn about their support. Note down how they provide support, their availability period, and response time.
- Is it pricey?: Every business has a budget. To make sure that you do not overspend, check if the plans are under your budget.
- Check web reviews: Checking online web reviews can help you make a better decision.
10 Best Cloud Hosting Providers Outline
1. DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean offers versatile cloud hosting services to its users. With it, you can not only host websites but also host full-fledged applications. So, if you are someone who is looking for a cloud hosting provider that offers the ability to host your application to the cloud, then DigitalOcean is a great choice.
As stated, DigitalOcean is an excellent fit for different types of projects, whether small or big. It is business-ready, which means it offers 99.99% uptime SLA, a reasonable pricing model, and good support.
DigitalOcean virtual machines are known as droplets, which gives you the ability to completely customize your hosting requirement. You can add droplets to increase RAM, CPU, and storage.
They also offer a 1-Click app marketplace where you can install applications such as WordPress, Docker, or LAMP with a single click.
Their 13 data centers are also spread across the world, including key locations such as London, New York, Amsterdam, Bangalore, and more!
The onboarding process is clean. It takes you all the steps, including selecting droplet size, block storage, data center region, and so on.
You can read our complete DigitalOcean Review
Support And Documentation
If you get stuck, you can get help from their detailed product documentation. Otherwise, you can connect with them through tickets. A ticketing system is a good approach, but it takes time for tickets to get resolved.
Price
DigitalOcean can be considered one of the cheapest options if you want to use the cloud for your site. Their cheapest plan in general droplets starts from $5/month., which consists of 1 GB memory, 1 vCPU, 1 TB Transfer, and 25GB SSD disk. That’s good enough for a new business.
You can also get hold of CPU-optimized droplets, memory-optimized droplets, and more! For a complete list, we recommend checking their pricing page.
What we didn’t like
DigitalOcean is not user-friendly as most of the configurations need to be done by the user itself. So, if your business decides to use it, you need to hire a developer.
| CPU | 1-40 vCPU |
| RAM | 1-256 GB |
| Storage | 1-12 TB |
| Root access | Yes |
| Backups | $1.00/mo per droplet(20% of the droplet price) for weekly backup |
| Money-back guarantee | None |
| Pricing | Starts from $5 per month |
2. Cloudways
Cloudways offers managed cloud hosting where you can choose to deploy your site in a matter of minutes. It also provides excellent support and is ideal for businesses who depend on support a lot. Also, their offering consists of plans that can be used by both enterprise businesses or SMEs.
Cloudways’ unique approach is that it also lets you choose the cloud service of your choice, including DigitalOcean, Vultr, AWS, Google Cloud, and Linode.
At the core of Cloudways, you get their ThunderStack. The stack ensures optimal performance by optimizing your hosting with technologies such as Apache, Nginx, Memcached, PHP7, and others.
You also get access to their 60 data centers spread across 25 locations. Developers can feel at home with key features such as one-click cloning, team-collaboration, backups, and more. You can read our complete Cloudways Review
Support
They offer excellent support with all their plans. You get backend live chat support for 24/7/365. However, if you need 24/7 phone support, you need to upgrade to their premium support plan to cost $500/month.
Price
As they take care of your hosting environment, the prices are comparatively higher than other hosting providers. For instance, you need to pay $10 per month if you choose the DigitalOcean(which apparently is $5 per month). This is also their most basic plan.
However, the extra payment is for additional services, including Free SSL, CDN Add-on, Free migration, and 24x7x365 support.
For more information, we recommend checking their pricing page.
What we didn’t like
They do not have domain registration options. Also, you need to pay more for emails.
| Bandwidth | 1-5 TB |
| RAM | 1-16 GB |
| Storage | 25-160 GB |
| Root access | Yes(depending on your choice of hosting server) |
| Backups | Automated backups |
| Money-back guarantee | No |
| Pricing | Starts from $10 per month |
3. SiteGround
SiteGround offers managed cloud hosting services for their customers. So, if you decide to get a cloud account with them, their DevOps will configure your cloud. You can also configure your cloud according to your requirement.
We recommend SiteGround for sites in a growth phase, and shared plans are not meeting their requirement anymore. If you are using WordPress, then you can also take the benefit of their WordPress-optimized plans.
With their managed cloud hosting, you get guaranteed resources. Just like other cloud hosting providers, you can add resources like CPU and RAM with a single click.
Siteground also offers a 99.98% uptime guarantee, which is ideal for any business out there. You also get access to their powerful webmaster tools, including SSH, SFTP, Free CDN, Free SSL, Dedicated IP, daily backups, and more!
You can read our complete SiteGround Review
Support
SiteGround offers advanced priority support for their cloud hosting service that is available 24/7. You can connect with them either via live chat, ticket or phone.
Price
SiteGround’s hosting plans are costly and start from $80 per month. In this plan, you get access to 3 CPU cores, 6 GB of memory, 40GB SSD space and 5TB data transfer.
What we didn’t like
SiteGround is costly when compared to other cloud hosting providers.
| Bandwidth | 5 TB |
| RAM | 6-12 GB |
| Storage | 40-120 GB |
| Root access | No |
| Backups | Yes, free of cost |
| Money-back guarantee | 15 days money-back guarantee |
| Pricing | Starts from $80 per month |
4. InMotion
InMotion is our next contender in the best cloud hosting provider. Apart from providing excellent VPS hosting, they also offer good cloud hosting services. However, their main selling point is their customer support.
If you are a small business, looking for a decent cloud hosting with excellent support, InMotion is for you. But, their services can also be used by enterprises if needed.
In terms of features, they provide everything that you would need to manage your website effectively. With each of their plans, you get access to unlimited email accounts, free domain, backups, and more.
With InMotion, you can fully customize your server. It also offers good security with proper malware and hack protection. You can read our InMotion Hosting Review
Support
InMotion’s support is one of the best when it comes to cloud hosting providers. They offer their support via chat and phone.
Price
The cloud VPS plans start from just $5 per month where they offer access to 1 GB ram, 1 CPU, 25GB SSD, and 1TB transfer.
You can check more about their pricing here.
What we didn’t like
InMotion offers relatively low ram capacity(32 GB max) compared to other cloud hosting providers.
| Bandwidth | 1-7 TB |
| RAM | 1-32 GB |
| Storage | 25-640 GB |
| Root access | Yes |
| Backups | Daily, yes |
| Money-back guarantee | 30-days money back guarantee |
| Pricing | Starts from $5 per month |
5. HostGator
If you are looking for a cheap cloud web hosting, then HostGator is for you. Their 99.99% uptime is promising and gives your site the necessary uptime to serve the visitors. However, they can only be used to host websites for now. If you need to have a custom application that needs cloud hosting, then you need to check out the other listed cloud hosting providers.
Their plans also have unmetered bandwidth and storage which can be useful for big websites. But, you need to keep in mind that unmetered metrics generally suffer from performance issues.
Other key features that their cloud hosting plans include an intuitive dashboard, integrated caching, resource management, cPanel, and more!Lastly, you can scale your resources with their one-click options. You can read our HostGator Review
Support
HostGator offers decent support for their cloud hosting plans. You can get support via their tool-free number and live chat.
Price
They offer three plans for cloud hosting. You can get started as low as $4.95 per month, which contains a single domain, 2 GB Ram, 2 Core CPU, a free SSL certificate, and a free domain. Also, their plans are 36-months contracts.
For more information regarding their pricing, you can check their pricing page.
What we didn’t like
Their plans are limited due to being low cost. For example, you do not get free backups. Also, they do not provide root access which can limit customization to a great extent.
| Bandwidth | Unmetered |
| RAM | 2-6 GB |
| Storage | Unmetered |
| Root access | No |
| Backups | No |
| Money-back guarantee | 45 days money back guarantee. |
| Pricing | Starts from $4.95 per month |
6. A2 Hosting
If you are looking for the fastest cloud hosting providers, then A2 Hosting is for you. They offer reliable cloud services with completely customizable options. Their key selling point is their high-performance SSDs and SwiftServer platform, which can give up to 20 times performance at an affordable price.
With A2 Hosting, you can also host as many websites as you want — which is not possible with other cloud hosting providers.
A2 Hosting does provide a money-back guarantee so that you can try their services before deciding on them. You can read our complete A2 Hosting Review
Support
Their support team is available 24/7/365. You can connect with them through the ticket system.
Price
A2 Hosting’s cloud options start at just $5 per month. It offers you access to 20 GB storage, 1 core CPU, 2 TB bandwidth, and 512 MB RAM. If you want to learn more, then check out their cloud hosting page.
What we didn’t like
We think that their server uptime can be improved to provide seamless hosting experience to businesses. You also do not get access to a free SSL certificate.
| Bandwidth | 2 TB |
| RAM | 512-1 GB |
| Storage | 20 – 250 GB |
| Root access | Yes |
| Backups | Free backups |
| Money-back guarantee | Anytime money back guarantee |
| Pricing | Starts from $5 |
7. DreamHost
DreamHost provides one of the best cloud hosting services with nicely priced plans. With DreamHost, you can launch the server in 30 seconds or less. Unlike other low-cost cloud hosting providers, they give you full root access, which means complete control over the server.
Scaling with DreamHost is also easy. Also, suppose you are working on a unique product that requires tweaking to the core. In that case, you will be happy to know that the cloud’s code is open source, giving you access to more customization and the ability to migrate to private clouds when you need to. This freedom goes a long way for many businesses out there as they do not want to get locked out of their hosting.
They also come with seamless WordPress support using DreamObjects that also facilitate backups.
It also supports all other technologies such as Redis, MongoDB, Ruby, Python, NodeJS. You can read our complete DreamHost Review
Support
If you need support, you can first check out their help bot, which is available through their chat widget 24/7/365. For customer support chat, you need to connect with their backend panel, where they are available every day, 5.30 AM – 9:30 PM PT.
Price
DreamHost plans start from $4.50, which is low enough for any business out there. However, the most expensive one can go up to $100.
What we didn’t like
DreamHost comes with plenty of downsides. For instance, you do not get a free domain with the hosting. Also, they do not offer any phone chat support and no money-back guarantee.
| Bandwidth | Free bandwidth |
| RAM | 0.5 – 8 GB |
| Storage | 80 GB |
| Root access | Yes |
| Backups | Yes for only WordPress sites |
| Money-back guarantee | No |
| Pricing | Starts from $4.50 per month |
8. Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure is one of the leading cloud solutions for businesses out there. If you are an enterprise and are looking to get your project to the cloud, then Azure is your answer. It is best suited for big projects, but you can host websites if needed.
You can use Azure if you want everything at a single place or have a website with millions of monthly visitors.
With Azure, you can host different kinds of applications using containers, compute, and hybrid solutions. They have solutions for almost everything on the cloud as they are one of the leading cloud hosting providers out there.
Support
As Azure is aimed at enterprises, it supports one of the best support systems out there. You can connect with Azure support through tickets or get answers via their forums. All customers get access to their basic support. However, if you need a phone or email support, you need to get their paid support plans.
Price
The pricing depends on what type of cloud service you are trying to get. However, they do have some entry level plans with basic configuration that can cost around $30 per month. For more information, check out their pricing page.
What we didn’t like
Azure can be confusing for someone new to cloud hosting. Also, managing the Azure cloud requires some technical skills and hence would need businesses to hire developers.
Note: The table is for AWS Lightsail service
| Bandwidth | 1-7 TB |
| RAM | 512-32 GB |
| Storage | 20-640 GB |
| Root access | Yes |
| Backups | Yes, automatic |
| Money-back guarantee | No |
| Pricing | Starts from $3.50 per month |
9. Kamatera
If you are looking for complete control of your cloud hosting environment, then Kamatera is for you. They provide full root access along with your choice of IP allocation. You also get the choice to choose from their 13 data centers spread across 4 continents.
This gives you the flexibility to do things the way you want. So, it is a breeze to scale the server when needed. You can change the RAM, Storage, and CPU and do other customization with just one click from the back end.
Kamatera also comes with support for Linux and Windows. You can read our complete Kamatera Review
Support
They offer support via phone and email 24/7. Also, to provide support to worldwide customers, they tend to cover all possible time zones.
Pricing
You can completely customize your plan with Kamatera. Their lowest plan starts from only $4, which gives you access to 1 vCPU, 20 GB storage, 1 GB RAM, and 1 TB of bandwidth.
For daily backups, you need to pay extra, which can cost $3 per month for their most basic plan.
What we didn’t like
They do not provide any money-back guarantee. However, they do offer a 30-Days free trial, which can be seen as equivalent to a money-back guarantee.
They also offer only 99.95% uptime, which can be slightly low for businesses running critical services.
| Bandwidth | 5 TB |
| RAM | 1-384 GB |
| Storage | 20-640 GB |
| Root access | Yes |
| Backups | No, paid options available |
| Money-back guarantee | No |
| Pricing | Starts from $4 per month |
10. Amazon AWS
Amazon AWS is one of the leading cloud hosting providers out there. With them, you can completely customize and be future-ready. As usual, there would be no problem if you want to scale your operations with them. They also have the highest market adoption rate with 68% market share.
AWS is best suited for enterprise projects, but you can also make most of it if you want to invest in the AWS ecosystem from the start. Their cloud ecosystem also supports all the tools, databases, operating systems, frameworks and programming languages.
With AWS, you can do everything from their ecosystem, which includes build, test, deploy and manage web projects. You can read our Amazon AWS Review
Support
They offer support for their customers through email only. Just like Azure, here also, you can buy the support plans that offer a better supporting system.
Pricing
The pricing of AWS completely depends on your requirements. They offer a pay-as-you-use model which is ideal for most of the businesses out there.
However, if you want to host a website, AWS Lightsail starts from just $3.50 per month.
For more pricing information, check out their pricing page.
What we didn’t like
Amazon AWS has a steep learning curve that can be detrimental for many businesses out there.
Note: The table is for AWS Lightsail service
| Bandwidth | 1-7 TB |
| RAM | 512-32 GB |
| Storage | 20-640 GB |
| Root access | Yes |
| Backups | Yes, automatic |
| Money-back guarantee | No |
| Pricing | Starts from $3.50 per month |
Conclusion
This leads us to the end of our 10 best cloud hosting providers. As you can see, not all cloud hosting providers are aimed to solve your problem. For example, suppose you are a business heavily invested in the Azure ecosystem, then for you. In that case, you can create a website using AWS Lightsail service.
Apart from that, we think, Kamatera, DigitalOcean, CloudWays, and InMotion give you the maximum flexibility while providing most of the key features for the optimal hosting experience. SiteGround and HostGator are also good, but they are limited as they do not provide root access.
So, which cloud hosting provider is a fit for you? Comment below and let us know.
