Cloud hosting is the most demanded hosting type in terms of scalability and flexibility for websites dealing with much traffic at certain times. It’s particularly where a website is stored on various servers. This way the website owner pulls resources from a diversity of places. Cloud hosting is especially great for those websites which experience dips and hikes in traffic.
With all the benefits that cloud hosting offers, you still need to spot the cloud hosting provider that guarantees what you expect to get. Nowadays, there are hundreds of hosting providers that deliver premium cloud hosting services. To relieve you from the daunting prospect of finding the right cloud hosting provider, we have conducted deep research on the most prominent website hosting companies delivering premium-class cloud hosting.
List of the Best Cloud Hosting Services:
| 1.HostGator | 3.Hostinger | 5.Liquid Web | 7.Scala Hosting | 9.DreamHost |
| 2.IONOS | 4.SiteGround | 6.Google Cloud | 8.Hetzner | 10.AWS Cloud |
To detect the most worthwhile cloud hosting providers of this year, we evaluated and compared the provided features, performance, support, and reputation of all the ten hosting companies. We compared pricing packages and the value for money that you get by purchasing each reviewed plan. All this aims at helping you come up with the right choice.
1. HostGator – Fully Managed Cloud Hosting
| Product Name: | HostGator |
| Official Website: | hostgator.com |
| Launched: | 2002 |
| Websites managed: | 2,232,625 |
| Test Plan: | No |
| Cheapest Cloud Hosting Plan: | $4.95/month |
| Refund: | 45 days |
HostGator – is a reputable cloud hosting provider that delivers amazing quality for value. The major benefits of this company in providing cloud hosting are fast load times and high uptimes, easy user interface, lots of freebies such as domain, SSL certificate, data mirroring, integrated caching, or SEO tools, quick and straightforward access to customer support, one-click WordPress installation, daily backups, a customized firewall against DDoS attacks, unlimited bandwidth, and storage. Agree that the number of advantages HostGator provides is impressive. Anyway, HostGator has certain downsides which should, by all means, be addressed to. They include significant upsells along the way, possible slowing of speeds, and limited backup options.
What we liked about HostGator most of all, is the ability to scale the hosting plan on demand. Therefore, if you own a fast-growing website with impressive volatility in the site traffic, we’d strongly recommend you to consider HostGator’s cloud plans available in three tiers – Hatchling (the cheapest), Baby Cloud (with the best balance of functionality and price), and Business (the most powerful). Irrespective of your choice, HostGator will provide you with an intuitive dashboard to monitor all the available metrics that affect your website’s performance.
The current price for the most inexpensive cloud hosting plan by HostGator is $4.95 per month. This is the starting plan. Mind that after renewal, the cost will be $8.95 per month. Hence, if you aim at opting for this hosting plan you’d better stick to the 3-year plan to pay 44.65% off overall. Even though you can’t test any of HostGator’s cloud plans for free, the 45-day refund is there for you to feel calm for your funds.
2. IONOS – Most Popular European Hosting Service
| Product Name: | IONOS |
| Official Website: | ionos.com |
| Launched: | 1988 |
| Websites managed: | 1,051,933 |
| Test Plan: | No |
| Cheapest Cloud Hosting Plan: | $1/month |
| Refund: | 30 days |
1&1 IONOS – is an ideal cloud hosting provider for businesses on tight budgets. With generous plans and reliable support, 1&1 Ionos guarantees you will get the results you expect. Choosing the cloud hosting services by 1&1 Ionos, you get such features as unlimited traffic, performance computing, round-the-clock customer support, VMware virtualization, SSD SAN systems, Windows and Linux servers, two-factor authentication, dependable uptime (99.99%), user-friendly website creating tools, 4 data centers. What we can’t praise 1&1 Ionos for are the relatively skimpy storage options.
1&1 IONOS has approached the cloud hosting type with a high level of seriousness. As a result, it has multiple managed and unmanaged cloud hosting tiers all of which can be outfitted with the Windows or Linux operating systems. The cheapest price is $1 per hour which comes roughly $4 per month for one CPU, 30 GB of SSD, 512MB of RAM, and unmetered monthly transfers. Overall, there are 13 cloud hosting tiers to meet any client’s requirements. What makes 1&1 Ionos stand out is the chance to build your own Cloud Server with FLEX. What does this mean? You get to select the vCores, SSD, and RAM convenient to you. You can build the plan billed from minute to monthly maximum.
The refund policy of 1&1 Ionos works only within the first 30 days of purchasing a cloud hosting plan. No free trial is available for website hosting here.
3. Hostinger – The Cheapest Cloud Hosting Solution
| Product Name: | Hostinger |
| Official Website: | hostinger.com |
| Launched: | 2004 |
| Websites managed: | 3,375,963 |
| Test Plan: | Free hosting available |
| Cheapest Cloud Hosting Plan: | $9.99/month |
| Refund: | 30 days |
Hostinger – is a remarkable website hosting company offering full cloud packages that stand out for their reliability and versatility. With Hostinger, you can concentrate purely on your business and rely the rest on the company. Cloud hosting comes with an imposing array of benefits involving the best control panel, integrated caching, LVE containers, daily backups, various data centers to ensure stable speed, useful freebies such as a free domain, SSL certificate, and dedicated IP, ample resource allocation. However, some points about Hostinger can be improved. These involve no sales support and not consistent uptime performance.
The cloud service by Hostinger is completely managed and powerful. It utilizes the latest technologies in delivering decent account isolation, redundancy, and performance. Hostinger Cloud comes excellently fitted for business projects. By purchasing any cloud plan from this hosting provider, you are also acquiring a support team service to care for any technicality you come across while hosting your website.
The cheapest Cloud Startup plan is priced at $9.99 per month if you decide to subscribe for a 4-year term. It allows for 2 CPU cores, 300 websites, 200 GB of SSD storage, and 3 GB RAM. The databases allowed are unlimited just as the bandwidth. However, mind that the renewal price for this plan will be significantly higher – $18.99 per month.
Don’t worry that the Cloud hosting by Hostinger may not suffice your needs. If any of the plans fail to deliver your requirements, you can make use of the 30-day refund guarantee.
4. SiteGround – Richly-Featured Cloud Hosting Provider
| Product Name: | SiteGround |
| Official Website: | siteground.com |
| Launched: | 2004 |
| Websites managed: | 206,157 |
| Test Plan: | No |
| Cheapest Cloud Hosting Plan: | €80.00/mo |
| Refund: | 30 days |
SiteGround – is a website hosting provider with some amazing hosting solutions that involve cloud hosting as well. You will find SiteGround among the three hosting companies recommended by WordPress. Besides this, the hosting provider also offers a series of other benefits including daily backups to make updates fast and safe while securing the user’s data, quickly responding customer support, optimization for higher speed and more productive user experience, data centers in three continents, high uptime (99.9%), a free domain, free SSL encryption, proactive server monitoring, SuperCacher for higher speed, free Cloudflare CDN, staging for Joomla and WordPress.
The range of cons, meanwhile, is led by the limited storage space (10 GB to 30 GB) when other companies offer unlimited storage and expensive prices as compared with the prices set by other hosting companies.
Indeed, the prices start at $100 per month, and this pricing tier, intended for 4 CPUs, involves 8GB of memory, 5TB data transfer, and 40GB of SSD space. The same features can be found at less expensive prices by other hosting providers. And yet, SiteGround is widely chosen particularly for the high level of reliability. If the presented pricing tiers don’t suffice you, the company suggests creating your own unique plan. You can choose one of the four suggested levels (Jump Start, Business, Business Plus, and Super Power) and then customize the CPU, Memory, and SSD space.
Even though SiteGround doesn’t offer a free trial period, you can make use of the 30-day money-back guarantee.
5. Liquid Web – Fully-Managed Hosting for Business
| Product Name: | Liquid Web |
| Official Website: | liquidweb.com |
| Launched: | 1998 |
| Websites managed: | 4,472,906 |
| Test Plan: | No |
| Cheapest Cloud Hosting Plan: | $149/month |
| Refund: | 30 days |
Liquid Web – is another giant company in the world of website hosting. However, it’s a relatively more expensive option and won’t fit projects with limited budgets. The hosting plan you purchase from this company delivers such exceptional qualities as DDoS and CDN protection, advanced security tools, integrated firewall, an amazing array of hosting plans catered to various business types and sizes, high-end hardware, excellent uptime. The list of disadvantages isn’t as large as that of advantages, with the mere points of a shared plan’s absence, and high pricing policy.
Liquid Web introduced several cloud hosting types – Cloud Dedicated (starts at $149 per month), VMware Private Cloud (starts at $510 per month), and Magento Cloud. The latter has the cheapest tiers priced starting at $149 per month.
Liquid Web is a truly stellar offer with high-quality hosting services. And yet, the hosting plans mostly suit big businesses and enterprises since small businesses and startups will consider this hosting overpriced. Nevertheless, Liquid Web cloud hosting will allow you to launch a website through different off-site server resources. Everything on such a server, including the cPanel and data, is tied up to the primary node. When your website is hosted with Liquid Web cloud hosting, the number of web nodes will increase as the traffic of the site grows thus sustaining high performance.
Therefore, thanks to Cloud hosting, your website won’t show any slowdowns no matter how much traffic you get on your website. Liquid Web also guarantees no technical issues related to hosting performance. With no trial period available, the company, yet, offers a full refund during the first 30 days of obtaining the plan provided that you are not fully satisfied with the hosting solution.
6. Google Cloud – 20X Faster Cloud Hosting
| Product Name: | Google Cloud |
| Official Website: | cloud.google.com |
| Launched: | 2011 |
| Websites managed: | 70,359,252 |
| Test Plan: | Yes |
| Cheapest Cloud Hosting Plan: | $150/month |
| Refund: | No |
Google Cloud – is among the most popular hosting providers offering to host dynamic and static sites in the cloud with either customized tools or Click to Deploy mode. It features an impressive toolset with App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and Big Query that make this solution an excellent choice for all types of industries.
The main benefits of this hosting provider include global private networks, better pricing policy compared to those of competing companies, robust website building tools, redundant backups, fast storage with uncapped bandwidth, security of data, and collaboration with the best tech companies of the world. However, there are some disadvantages that Google Cloud hosting comes with including broken SDKs and poor documentation – in fact, some of the features offered seem to be yet in the beta stage for what feels like ages, while the array of features can’t be described as rich.
What we liked about this host is that the customer support of Google Cloud grows as the size of the service increases. In combination with a convenient billing system and over 20 data centers globally, it definitely makes sense to try Google Cloud for hosting your website whether it’s a blog, a private site, or a business. Even if you don’t have any experience in the field, you will find the GC platform sleek and modern.
And finally, you will love to learn that the company offers to start the journey entirely for free. And you don’t simply get a trial month. The company gives you $300 in credits to spend on the hosting during 90 days. and once the free trial period is over, you won’t be charged automatically. Unless you upgrade your paid account manually, you won’t be exposed to any charges. The pricing depends on which features you want to include in your package. But if your budget is limited, you’d better search for another platform. Google Cloud is mostly appropriate for those users whose hosting requirements tend to grow in the future, and they need robust infrastructure to scale with the business.
7. Scala Hosting – Another Top-Rated Hosting Provider
| Product name: | Scala Hosting |
| Official Website: | scalahosting.com |
| Launched: | 2007 |
| Websites managed: | Over 700,000 |
| Test Plan: | No |
| Cheapest hosting plan: | $29.95/month |
| Refund: | 7 days |
ScalaHosting – is another top-rated hosting provider that offers quality cloud and website hosting solutions. The system has over 13 years of experience, powering over 700,000 websites around the globe.
ScalaHosting servers are found in European countries and the USA. They reveal noteworthy performance, functionality and speed. These are the major factors that affect hosting popularity. Recent shared/VPS hosting test results constitute 37 and 30 ms correspondingly. The uptime rate is high as well, featuring 99.9%, while the average server load time is 528 ms. These parameters are above average.
The company has special offers for shared hosting, dedicated servers, VPS and business email hosting as well as reseller plans. Its advanced SPanel is worth special attention due to its user-friendliness and intuitive nature. It does not require programming proficiency, which makes it a nice pick for all user categories. Everyone will be able to easily upload emails, websites, domains, databases and other modules due to the availability of built-in FTP tools and file manager.
Other highlights of the service include an opportunity of website migration, automated backups, SSL Certificate connection, domain name registration, White Label Hosting, advanced SShield cybersecurity protection, unlimited email accounts. If you run a WordPress website and wish to host it with Scala Hosting, you can do that with one click only.
Other features that are worth user attention include the availability of automated backups, opportunity of website migration and domain name registration, SSL Certificate connection and White Label Hosting, One-click WordPress installation is available here as well. What users don’t like about the platform sometimes is absence of the built-in website builder. This triggers the need to look for a third-party web design software to further host a project with Scala Hosting.
The pricing policy is versatile here as well to meet diverse user categories. The first group – Web Hosting (WordPress) plans includes subscriptions, the cost of which ranges between $3.95 and $29.95 per month. The second group – Fully Managed VPS Hosting – comes with 4 plans. Their cost ranges between $14.95 and $179.95 per month. Extra features are available at extra cost. Mind that the prices become higher after the renewal of the hosting term.
8. Hetzner – Zero-Downtime Cloud Solution
| Product Name: | Hetzner |
| Official Website: | hetzner.com |
| Launched: | 1997 |
| Websites managed: | 8,620,830 |
| Test Plan: | No |
| Cheapest Cloud Hosting Plan: | €4.51/mo |
| Refund: | No |
Hetzner – is a noteworthy German website hosting provider that started offering its services back in 1997. The main benefits of this host include free SSL certificates in all plans, cheap pricing, detailed analyses and log files, a generous quality of features including CLI and REST-API developer’s tools, floating IPS, an impressive variety of operating systems, much bandwidth, DDoS protection, 7 backups, and data protection.
The downsides, on the other side, involve the absence of a trial period and refund and setup fee (though one-off).
Two of the company’s three data centers are in Germany while the third is in Finland. This guarantees the excellent performance of Hetzner in the territory of Europe.
One of the unique sides of this company is that it doesn’t demand any minimum contract period. In fact, if you decide to abandon the pricing plan, you get to pay only for the time you have used the hosting services on an hour-based form.
Nevertheless, the pricing for cloud hosting by Hetzner starts at €4.51 per month. Overall, there are 4 price tiers for cloud hosting available here.
9. Dreamhost – The Best Cloud Hosting Provider
| Product Name: | Dreamhost |
| Official Website: | dreamhost.com |
| Launched: | 1996 |
| Websites managed: | 620,777 |
| Test Plan: | No |
| Cheapest Hosting Plan: | $4.5/month |
| Refund: | 30 days |
Dreamhost – is a website hosting company offering its premium services since 1996 including cloud server hosting. The basic reasons why your choice should fall on DreamHost include affordable pricing and plan simplicity, free CloudFare CDN and SSL, high speed of page loading and great uptime, reliable security tools, large-scale domain-management features, dependable customer support, Windows, BSD, and Linux based servers.
The most palpable disadvantage of using cloud hosting by DreamHost, meanwhile, is the lack of consistency of text-based control panel intuitiveness.
The cloud hosting services by DreamHost cover two fields – cloud computing and cloud object storage. The first area is great in developing and growing one’s own cloud services. Whether you have BSD, Linux, or Windows serverless environments are available to choose from. They all are based on the newest and most powerful next-gen processors and SSD storage.
DreamHost cloud hosting allows users to publish site apps across multiple servers at an affordable cost. In fact, the prices start at $4.5 per month that come with 100GB block storage, unmetered bandwidth, and 80 GB SSD disk. As DreamHost claims, this plan is ideal for tinkering.
DreamObjects is the safe cloud storage hosting service of DreamHost company. The primary aim of DreamObjects is to enhance or replace AWS E3 services when used as a web development environment.
Overall, the use of DreamHost’s cloud services might feel overwhelming for inexperienced and new users. Yet, with the affordability of the starting plans, exploring and growing the cloud services becomes quite expedient.
10. AWS Cloud – Most Comprehensive Cloud Platform
| Product Name: | AWS Cloud |
| Official Website: | aws.amazon.com |
| Launched: | 2006 |
| Websites managed: | 31% of the cloud market |
| Test Plan: | Yes |
| Cheapest Cloud Hosting Plan: | pay-as-you-go |
| Refund: | 30 days |
AWS Cloud (Amazon Web Services) – is one of the most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platforms. It offers its users more than 200 completely featured services from different data centers worldwide. What we can sincerely praise AWS Cloud for are the huge array of available services – more than any competing service can offer, a straightforward setup thanks to simple documentation, built-in image editor, file revision history, free SSL certificate, 99.99% uptime guaranteed, many industry standards compliance, data centers in over 30 countries to ensure fast clouding.
The cons of AWS Cloud, meanwhile, are limited with poor migration of services and workloads from on-prem to Amazon Web Services.
AWS Cloud is equally appropriate for quickly-growing startups and already established large enterprises. Even leading government agencies rely on AWS Cloud when it comes to choosing a website hosting solution. AWS Cloud aims at helping companies globally to lower costs, innovate safer, and turn more agile.
The supported devices are Web-based, Linux, Windows, and Mac.
One of the main perks of Amazon Web Services is the free tier, which is a rare thing when it comes to website hosting solutions. Thanks to it, you can explore around 100 products entirely for free for different time periods. Certain features are granted with a fully free lifetime, meaning they won’t expire and are available to all AWS users. Other products are offered to new users to try for free for 12 months or on short terms. The pricing model of AWS Cloud is of pay-as-you-go type. You choose differently priced products you want to be included in your package and pay for them only.
11. Cloudways – Managed Cloud Hosting Platform
| Product Name: | Cloudways |
| Official Website: | cloudways.com |
| Launched: | 2011 |
| Websites Powered: | N/A |
| Test Plan: | Yes (3-day) |
| Cheapest Cloud Hosting Plan: | $14/month |
| Refund: | No |
Cloudways – is a website hosting company offering affordable but powerful hosting and easy setup. The features that make up the list of advantages are the impressive scalability, fast servers, automatic backups, the exceptional ThunderStack Formula, migration and simple configuration, custom control panel, relatively lower costs, team collaboration tools, regular security patching, SFTP, and SSH access, dedicated firewalls, free migration, and incredible customer support.
The downsides, meanwhile, are the inability to register a domain name and the somewhat complex setup process.
Undoubtedly, Cloudways offers some of the most powerful cloud hosting services in the niche. By choosing this hybrid platform, you get the right to set up one of the most reliable WordPress cloud hosting options – Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, AWS, Vultr, and Linode. And since Cloudways introduces the pay-as-you-go model, you get complete flexibility in terms of paying for the services you get. The starting plan hosting only 1 Core processor, however, costs $14 per month with 1TB bandwidth, 25GB of storage, and 1GB of RAM.
Surely, this is not the cheapest option out there, but the balance of price and the power you get for it is excellent.
Another feature of Cloudways, which is rare among hosting providers, is the free trial available. Furthermore, the company doesn’t even require credit card details.
If you own a small business, are an entrepreneur, or are a start-up founder, you won’t get a better variant than Cloudways.
12. RedSwitches – Fully-Customizable Cloud Application Platform
| Product Name: | RedSwitches |
| Official Website: | redswitches.com |
| Launched: | 2011 |
| Websites managed: | - |
| Test Plan: | Yes |
| Cheapest cloud hosting plan: | Depends on the options |
| Refund: | No |
RedSwitches – is a fully-customizable cloud application platform, which is easy to scale for beginners and simple to deploy for experienced web developers. It stands out from the crowd due to its integrated toolset and hosting solutions required to quickly build, customize, deploy and scale user apps. The service guarantees automatic vertical and horizontal scaling without downtime, migration between clouds, a set of pre-configured servers, easy self-service portal for handy app, prototyping and creation. Users can also get enhanced docker support and the opportunity to configure traffic distribution between instances by means of using the system interface.
What’s more, the software grants access to the list of pre-designed applications that can be installed with one click only. They refer to various niches. Thus, it is possible to create and deploy apps for the most popular CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, OpenCMS, Ghost etc.), eCommerce software (Magento, OpenCart, Maian Cart, PrestaShop, WooCommerce etc.), DevOps (GitLab, Docker, Jenkins, Minlo, Engine CE etc.) and other popular systems (XWiki, Doku Wiki, Odoo, NextCloud, OSTicket etc.).
RedSwitches also allows deploying PHP, Java, NET, Python, Ruby and Node.js applications in almost no time and with no need of code editing. This is done by means of using GIT, Docker, SVN, archives and special built-in plugins like NetBeans, Maven, Eclipse, Ant, IntelliJ IDEA and many more.
Users additionally avail the opportunity to scale their projects even on the go both vertically and horizontally by setting up automated triggers and using a ready-made Traffic Distributor app needed to balance the load and evenly distribute the traffic. If needed, the software allows setting up multi-cloud clusters as well as connecting and managing hosting, infrastructure and other special services.
RedSwitches pricing is also worth users attention due to its scalability, flexibility and special approach to the final cost formation. The software does not charge fixed rates for its services. Instead, it allows choosing only those resources and features that are required for the best project performance. Just view and add those options your server currently lacks for high end functioning.
Thus, the system charges separate fees for the following parameters: Computing (Reserved and Dynamic Outlets), Disk Space, Traffic and Special Options. There is a free trial here for those who are interested in exploring the pricing model as well as viewing and testing some of the features to estimate the required budget.
Verdict
Cloud hosting is a reliable and innovative hosting type that has transformed the hosting industry for the better due to increasing resilience and reliability for clients.
Choosing a cloud hosting provider for your website, it’s important to make a well-thought decision. Base your choice on such key factors as your budget, customer support (especially matters if you are new to the hosting sphere), a refund chance, uptime, and root access. All the companies reviewed in this article meet the mentioned criteria to a different extent.
If you are searching for a relatively cheaper hosting solution, it’s worth considering HostGator, 1&1 IONOS or Hetzner providers with the latter appropriate particularly for European users. RedSwitches, in its turn, offers flexible and scalable pricing, letting users select and pay for those features they need to enhance their project performance. However, if you can afford paying more, we’d recommend you purchase the cloud hosting services by Scala Hosting, Liquid Web or Hostinger. And don’t forget about the generous $300 free credits for hosting that Google Cloud offers to new users.
