Cloud hosting pulls its resources from a variety of sources to create a virtual server instead. With shared hosting, if your server goes down, your site goes down. If a cloud server goes down, other servers in the network pick up the slack. Cloud hosting gives you an excellent balance between affordability and power.
What Is Cloud Hosting?
Cloud hosting is where your site is stored on multiple servers, which lets you pull resources from a variety of different places. This makes cloud hosting a very scalable, reliable, and flexible type of hosting, perfect for sites that experience hikes and dips in things like traffic.
Cloud hosting is great for anyone who needs flexibility. Think of your plan like a pay-as-you-go mobile: you decide your own resource limits each month, and pay accordingly. If you have a big marketing campaign coming up, for example, cloud hosting allows you to prepare for a one-off busy month.
There are dozens – if not hundreds – of hosting providers to choose from, and finding the right one can be a daunting prospect. That’s why we’ve undertaken hours of research to find the best cloud hosts in the business.
Best Cloud Hosting Providers and Services
- A2 Hosting: Best Overall for Cloud Hosting.
- Cloudways: A Close Runner-Up.
- Kamatera: Best for Customization.
- SiteGround: Best features.
- Hostwinds: Best for Those on a Budget.
- InMotion: Best Help & Support.
- HostGator: Unmetered Storage.
- DreamHost: Cheapest Cloud Hosting.
- Hostinger: Best Control Panel.
Let’s have a quick look at the top three from our list. A2 Hosting takes first place, with impressive features and an anytime money-back guarantee. Cloudways earns the second spot for its flexible data center options, while Kamatera takes third place with excellent customization options.
Random-access Memory (RAM) is a kind of digital brainpower. It provides the data storage necessary for computers to complete tasks. The more RAM your site has, the more work it can handle. For most websites, a gigabyte (GB) or two ought to have you covered.
Computer Processing Units (CPUs) are the cores of your server. They act as the brain, processing information. Naturally, the more you have, the more efficient your site becomes.
Bandwidth is the amount of data that can flow between servers (i.e. your site), the internet, and users. Bandwidth dictates how much information can travel along its connections, as well as how quickly. Hosting with good bandwidth allows your site to cope with high traffic.
Root Access gives you the ability to customize your server’s environment. You can install specialist software, such as extra security, and make changes to hardware settings. This adds an extra layer of flexibility to your hosting and gives you greater control.
What we like about A2 Hosting
When it comes to cloud hosting, A2 Hosting can’t be beaten. It came top of our research for features, and it also has an anytime money-back guarantee – something not offered by any other provider.
It’s not too expensive either, with cloud plans starting at $4.99 per month; while the uptime isn’t the best at 99.95%, you do get a wealth of excellent features.
These features include up to 250GB of storage, 12 CPU cores, and 32GB of RAM. Oh, and you can host an unlimited number of websites – something you which other cloud hosting providers don’t offer.
What could be improved
Having to pay for an SSL certificate as an add-on is a little annoying – as is not getting a free domain – but for a starting price of $4.99, you can’t go wrong.
What we like about Cloudways
Cloudways is a strong second-place option, and it could be number one depending on what you’re looking for. This platform lets you deploy your cloud servers from one of over 25 global locations, and you can choose the region and city yourself.
This means that you’ll never be too far from your servers, which is great for site speed. It also means that Cloudways’ plans are more flexible than those of its competitors. Prices depend on your chosen data center, but you also get to choose between monthly or hourly pricing packages, depending on what best suits your website.
For example, you can pay $10/month for the basic plan with a Digital Ocean data center in New York, San Francisco, London, and a few other cities. Or, if you value a lot of flexibility, you can get the same plan and data center for a pay-as-you-go rate of $0.0139/hour.
What could be improved;
What we like about Kamatera
Kamatera is the only hosting solution that gives you complete control over your cloud hosting, whether the task be deciding who gets root access to your servers, or choosing your IP allocation.
Kamatera also offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to scaling resources up or down. Server capacity can be increased or decreased in minutes, and elements like CPU, RAM, storage space, and even firewalls can be added or taken away with one click on your end.
In short, Kamatera is great if you want a fully personalized hosting plan.
What could be improved
If you value uptime over customization, be aware that Kamatera can only guarantee 99.95% uptime. In general, this is still a strong percentage, and only amounts to about 4.5 hours of downtime a year. But compared to the 99.99% guarantees of HostGator and Cloudways, Kamatera’s uptime does fall a little short.
What we like about SiteGround
With excellent help and support on offer (via phone, live chat and email), as well as a very strong uptime guarantee of 99.98%, and great features, you can’t go too far wrong with SiteGround. Our hosting research found this to be a hugely reliable provider, with an overall score of 3.7/5.
What could be improved
There are a couple of places where SiteGround lost points. First, it doesn’t offer a free domain name with its plans. If you don’t yet have a domain name, getting one for free is a handy bonus, and is something many other providers offer. Second, the $80 starting price is a lot higher than with other providers – if you’re coming from a shared plan, this will feel like quite a step up.
That said, SiteGround generally scores well across the board, and its combination of great uptime, great support, and 5TB bandwidth make it a standout for features.
What we like about Hostwinds
Hostwinds offers a decent amount of storage, bandwidth, and RAM on its cloud plans, plus one-click install options for most applications.
The best part of a Hostwinds plan is the hourly pricing breakdown. For example, its most basic cloud hosting plan comes out to $0.006931/hour, while its most advanced cloud plan costs $0.456931/hour. That amounts to $4.99 and $328.99/month, respectively, and every Hostwind plan in between is cheap in comparison to competitors (although you’ll save more money with DreamHost). Best of all, this provider’s 60 day money-back guarantee lasts longer than most.
What could be improved
Hostwinds is cheap, and you’ll get decent value for your money. That said, you won’t have access to the same depth and breadth of features that you’d get with a more
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