14 Best Cloud Web Hosting Services in 2024 (Cheap & Fast)

Cloud computing has grown into a complex ecosystem of technologies, products, and services, with revenue from the sector expected to rise to $331 billion by 2022.

Consequently, a lot of providers are expected to get into the market, looking to take profit from its growing industry size.

For you, this means more sub-par service providers to rake aside to find the best for your business.

Getting the most out of cloud hosting is also a problem for a lot of website owners due to the complexities of the technologies involved.

Not to worry. Here, you get to learn everything you need to know about cloud hosting; from the best providers in the market to how you can remain satisfied with your cloud hosting environment.

What are the Best Cloud Web Hosting Services?

1. SiteGround

Best Cloud Hosting Service For WordPress And WooCommerce Websites

SiteGround is dedicated to solving the issue of uptime and claims to guarantee an uptime of 99.99%, which amounts to less than two hours of downtime per year, which is great for your website hosting.

If you are running a WordPress-based website, then SiteGround may be the right place for you. It offers managed WordPress hosting on all of its plans, which means the website host helps to handle essential services like automatic updates for WordPress.

Alongside these WordPress options, SiteGround also supports all manner of content management systems, as well as static sites on generic servers.

Quality cloud hosting products and services are provided for those who need to repeatedly but temporarily scale up their websites based on demand.

Cloud hosting with SiteGround is a fully managed service, as experienced developers help you configure and manage your cloud account, ensuring that you get the right amount of maintenance on all levels and that you focus on more important business issues.

Growing businesses enjoy a unique auto-scale option, which automatically adds more resources in times of unexpected traffic spikes, helping to prevent traffic loss and downtime.

You can easily host and manage your client accounts, allowing you to tailor the resources allocated to each of the websites hosted on your cloud and also to specify which website management tools will be available to your clients.

Managed WordPress and WooCommerce options give you a chance to host your WordPress and eCommerce websites on cloud servers and enjoy amazing performance through a managed service.

Managed updates, as well as Staging, Git & WP-CLI, make your WordPress and WooCommerce development flows easier.

As a webmaster, you also enjoy powerful tools at your disposal.

SSH & SFTP ensure that you enjoy secure file transfer and management and Dedicated IPs on your cloud account provide you with the independence and peace of mind you so desire.

A free Cloudflare CDN makes your site faster when you have visitors from different geographical locations and an automatically issued free SSL provides you with basic protection at no extra cost.

You enjoy daily, automatic backups and collaboration tools to work with other developers on your websites.

Customer servicing is not left out. Advanced priority support ensures issues reported through chat or tickets are assigned, with priority, to experienced and expert support agents.

Pricing

SiteGround provides its services on four different pricing plans; Jumpstart, Business, Business Plus, and Superpower.

2. A2 Hosting

Best Cloud Hosting Service With Great Value For Money

A2 Hosting offers multiple tiers of cloud hosting for different hosting needs and website sizes, unfortunately, they are only limited to the Linux operating system.

You enjoy up to 8GB of RAM, 150GB RAID-10 SSD storage space, and 2 terabytes of bandwidth capability for your website to remain up and running smoothly.

Domain registration and transfer capabilities as well as SSL certificates make A2 Hosting a platform to start and grow your online journey securely.

Great uptime isn't the most significant feature A2 Hosting uses as its selling point but your website can achieve an average uptime of 99.95%. This is impressive for your website as no website host can guarantee you 100% uptime.

Your website can achieve great website load times with the website host’s easy Cloudflare setup which can be accessed from your cPanel.

Excellent customer support and security define everything you have to get from working with A2 Hosting.

You are provided with super-secure servers which offer you both digital and physical protection.

A dual hosting firewall, in addition to an overall network firewall, ensures that you are able to block unauthorized users from gaining access to your control panel.

Limited server access which involves keys instead of passwords is used by A2 Hosting’s staff members to access servers. Keys are more secure and harder to guess than passwords, meaning you don't have to worry about a security breach at the other end of the internet.

A reinforced Distributed Denial of Service (or DDoS) protection is also made available for your server security.

Attacks occur in the form of large volumes of fake traffic, where this fake traffic gets sent to a web server, using up the server’s resources so that legitimate traffic is unable to access it. DDoS works to prevent this form of cyber attack.

A2 Hosting’s responsive customer service team called the “Guru Crew” is highly rated, and always around to help through one-to-one assistance.

24/7 availability to make sure your site runs smoothly and a range of support options; from online tickets to a searchable knowledge base, email options, global phone lines, and a live chat feature, allow you to directly relate with the Guru Crew any day and any time.

A2’s cloud hosting services come alongside its VPS hosting package and you can choose which of them you want to make use of.

Pricing

A2's VPS pricing scheme is spread across four plans; Runway 1, Runway 2, Runway 4, and Supersonic 8 and you can enjoy a 30-day money-back guarantee.

3. Cloudways

Best Cloud Hosting Service With The Most Extended Server Scalability

Cloudways is a cloud hosting platform that offers multiple, dedicated cloud-based services that help you grow your business with the least restrictions and increased freedom.

You enjoy partnerships and integrations with top cloud service providers like MalCare, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, and AWS as well as a dedicated server environment on all tiers, allowing you to maximize server and app performance to their fullest.

PHP application support and an innovative control panel are also made available to you.

SSD-based hosting, which proves to be 3x faster, helps to facilitate this breathtaking performance and reduced page load times for your high-traffic websites.

You can effectively and efficiently scale your website performance and experience improved load times through an Optimized stack, a Built-in CDN, auto-healing servers for uninterrupted service, and PHP 7.3 ready servers.

PHP 7-ready servers are claimed to be significantly faster than predecessors and the CloudwaysCDN is a simple but powerful service that delivers superior performance and one of the best global response times. Its integration into your cloud hosting activities is simple, with only a few clicks needed and zero technicalities.

The auto-healing, managed cloud servers ensure that you don’t have to worry about your website crashing as most of the issues within the server are resolved with auto-healing restarts.

You can also enjoy a free WordPress cache plugin that gives you better WordPress performance and at no extra cost, as it is pre-installed on Cloudways.

Cloudways’ ever-ready security architecture keeps all your servers safe and secure.

This is defined by dedicated firewalls, 1-Click Free SSL Installation, IP whitelisting, regular security patching, two-factor authentication, and bot protection.

You are able to protect your websites from traffic congestion caused by malicious bots, brute force login attacks, and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks through its partnership with MalCare.

You can clone entire servers or make copies of individual sites and make seamless server transfers that allow you to easily transfer ownership of the servers to your clients or any other party using the 1-Click hosting feature.

Also, with Cloudways’ 24/7/365 customer support, managed security, automated backups, and 24/7 real-time website and server monitoring, you are assured of a worry-free cloud hosting experience and greater control over your applications and servers.

Enhanced SLAs double your live chat access and cut online ticket response times to 3 hours, for normal priority or 30 mins, for high priority. Premium SLAs offer you even slicker problem-solving options.

Server customization and configuration alongside phone access support, self-service troubleshooting options, and proactive application monitoring are provided to give you extra support.

Automated or on-demand backups are also created by Cloudways at an offsite location, ensuring that you never lose configurations or whole websites.

Pricing

Digital Ocean plans

AWS plans

Google Cloud plans

4. Kamatera

Best Cloud Hosting Service with Extended Control, Great Backup, And Special Servers

Kamatera is one of the few hosting solutions that give you complete control over your cloud hosting activities, whether it be the task of deciding who gets root access to your servers or even choosing your IP allocation.

Firewalls can be added or taken away with just one click on your end and as your traffic demand sees fit.

With the Intel 2.7GHz+ Xeon Platinum/Cascade Lake Processors, you get to run your server on one of the latest processors with possibly up to 300% more power per CPU than previous generations.

A Global network consisting of 40 Gbit public & private networking centers ensures that you have fast networking speed between your servers and the Internet backbone.

SSD Storage and RAM of up to 512GB per server ensure that your website load times and performance are never an issue.

You are also guaranteed dedicated server resources, with no overselling or sharing of CPU, RAM, or any other system resources with other users on the internet.

Kamatera allows you to create servers, clone them quickly, deploy your own servers in seconds through its user-friendly cloud management console.

With app servers, you can build your next solution application on a powerful virtual machine with reliable uptime and optimal performance and pick the perfect server type that matches your needs.

Development servers allow you to easily adjust R&D resources according to your team’s requirements while database servers enable you to deploy your solution database on a reliable hosted virtual machine.

Remote desktop servers, WordPress Servers, email servers, VoIP Servers, CRM servers, and backup servers are only a few additions to its long list of cloud server solutions to different needs of users.

Pricing

You can enjoy a 30-day free trial across nine different customizable pricing plans.

Plans go up to $80 per month and can be paid per hour, offering you a very scalable and flexible pricing scheme.

5. Hostwinds

Cloud Hosting Service With The Most User-Friendly Server Management Options

Hostwinds offers you one-click installation possibilities for most applications, to give you easy and sufficient website hosting options.

Through its Rocketship feature, you can deploy your cloud servers Instantly and have them up and running in seconds.

A Paintbrush feature gives you the choice of customizing your Instance through a wide variety of popular operating systems, pre-built applications, or pre-edited templates to quickly jump-start your cloud experience.

Customizable templates ensure that you can configure and fine-tune the perfect server environment for your website and quickly deploy future servers using the same configuration with just one click.

Select your location through its Location tag feature which allows you to deploy your server in the geographic location that works best for you and enjoy full management of your cloud hosting activities and support experts that are always available 24/7/365.

Assistance can be gotten via Live Chat or support ticket anytime and prompt response is received from a real human being, not bots.

SSD drives significantly increase the speed of your server and you have SSH options that allow you to create or import your SSH keys on your server with ease within the cloud control Portal.

You can ensure that your cloud server is protected through Hostwinds’ enterprise firewall feature which monitors incoming and outgoing network traffic based on the security rules defined by you.

Your server is provided with easy, instant storage on demand through block storage volumes which are more cost-effective and convenient in adding more capacity to your cloud servers.

This block storage option saves you from the pain of limited data storage as you can add volume on the go and with scalable costs.

A robust, object-based storage system is also made available to help you seamlessly manage your ever-expanding data growth.

As your system has to grow as you generate more data, the object storage feature helps to resolve durability issues that may arise when your bandwidth reaches terabytes or petabytes.

This is done without compromising the stability of your servers or the speed of your websites.

Pricing

Pricing is charged per hour across 10 different plans.

6. DigitalOcean

Presents You With One Of The Best Website Speed And Uptime Ratings

DigitalOcean offers quality cloud hosting services trusted by popular brands like Docker, Gitlab, and Slack.

Your websites are promised a 99.99% uptime, SLA, and DNS options that ensure uninterrupted and secured cloud servers l.

Global data centers and up to 40 GbE hypervisor connectors are also made available to you, making sure you can guarantee fast website load times for your global audience.

An easy-to-use API for extended cloud server and hosting management also gives you extra capabilities in keeping your website hosting as efficient as you need it to be.

Monitoring and alerting options give you a chance to track servers in real-time and notice a problem before it has a chance at affecting your websites.

Enterprise-level SSDs for fast server processing are also one of the different features provided by DigitalOcean that ensure your websites operate at the utmost performance required for your traffic.

You also have access to a variable list of virtual machines with shared-CPU configurations that are designed differently for running low, medium, and large-sized workloads and website traffic.

Dedicated Intel CPU hosting gives you cloud hosting options designed for CPU-intensive applications like CI/CD, video encoding, machine learning, ad serving, and batch processing, among others, are also made available to you.

Pricing

DigitalOcean’s pricing is spread across three different pricing schemes; Standard, General Purpose, and CPU Optimized.

The Standard plan offers 11 different plans for easy scalability and prices can go up to $960.6 plans are offered through the General-purpose plan and the CPU optimized plan contains 5 different plans.

7. InMotion

Cloud Computing Platform With Excellent Server Recovery Options

InMotion is a cloud application platform that is perfect for your website and application development.

You get to enjoy a cloud VPS platform with high-availability and full control of your environment to deploy whatever operating system, backup protocols, snapshots, and management system as you so wish.

Full root access also gives you complete control of your cloud servers and you can make your preferred choice of the type of Linux OS you wish to use; either CentOS, Ubuntu, or Debian.

You can enjoy enterprise-level security options such as DDoS defense, SSH keys, and cloud firewalls, among others, ensuring that your cloud infrastructure remains secure.

Your server management activities like configurations and deployment of servers are expanded and simplified thanks to InMotion’s Ansible UltraStack Playbook; an open-source automation framework.

InMotion also proffers solutions for I.T. teams to quickly build and deploy multiple applications at the same time.

More code can be written in less time, with less infrastructure used and, through the managed cloud hosting services, you get to spend more time coding your applications and less time managing your cloud servers.

You can use the programming languages, libraries, and software that you are already accustomed to without having to learn new skills.

Alongside rapid server configuration and deployment, InMotion’s reliable infrastructure gives you extra benefits like automatic node failover, hardware and data replication, and free automatic backups to keep your websites up at all times, even when there is a problem with your existing server.

You can customize your virtual servers and track the status of each server being used by you through a resource monitoring dashboard, making sure you maintain high availability.

Live-state and scheduled snapshots can be taken to create real-time server images for easy rollbacks, in case your customizations go wrong and you are looking for a template to follow.

With all these services offered by InMotion, it is trusted by top brands like Dell, Lenovo, Intel, and Samsung, among others.

Pricing

8. Linode

Comprehensive Cloud Management And Customer Support System

Linode is another cloud hosting platform that allows you to easily deploy cloud compute, storage, and networking servers in seconds through a full-featured API, CLI, and user-friendly cloud manager interface.

The cloud computing platform is trusted by over 1 million customers worldwide and claims to offer 99.99% uptime and SLA to your websites.

Linode's API gives you extended, programmatic control of your cloud infrastructure while the CLI gives you command-line access to your servers, ensuring that you have as much freedom and access as you need.

A cloud manager with an intuitive dashboard is also provided to you for proper management of your cloud servers and hosted websites.

The Linode cloud manager makes it easy for you to create and manage your services and account and also set custom permissions based on the level of access you want to give to each user.

Custom alerts can be set up to tell you when you're getting close to your resource limits and you can explore extra cloud hosting solutions like cloud-based GPUs, a marketplace, and more.

Video streaming options, machine learning capabilities, and eLearning solutions are also some extra features Linode uses to complement its cloud-based solutions.

It is affordable and presents you with a high-performance cloud computing infrastructure that comes along with free bundled support, transfer, and DDoS Protection.

Linode's data centers are powered by dark fiber and spread across 11 regions, ensuring that you can easily maintain the quality global reach and local presence needed to keep your website load-times as fast as you want them to be.

Through an Alternative Cloud feature, Linode also allows you to move your apps and hosted websites from one cloud host to another without fear of vendor lock-in, which is a medium used by website hosting services to prevent migrations.

If you have a minor issue or are willing to learn something new, Linode also presents a library consisting of over 3,000 guides that cut across beginner to advanced topics.

A community of Linode users and Linux enthusiasts can also be communicated with to get some answers.

Customer support that is dedicated to providing thoughtful, timely, and accurate responses is also provided to you. More technical issues can be registered and solved through tickets, email, or phone calls.

Pricing

Pricing cuts across four different schemes; Shared, Dedicated, High Memory, and GPU.

The Shared plan consists of 10 differently priced servers, the Dedicated plan consists of 8 servers while the High Memory plan offers 5 different servers.

Four plans are provided through the GPU plan and prices can go up to $4,000 per month.

9. HostGator

Best Cloud Hosting Provider For One-Stop, Overall Website Management

HostGator is among the best one-stop platforms for hosting your websites as it gives you everything required for overall website management; from domain options to multiple types of hosting to one of the best website building tools, and more.

All services come with unlimited email addresses, bandwidth, storage, and you also enjoy free website transfers from other hosting service providers.

For cloud hosting, HostGator provides a long list of features to keep your websites running.

An integrated, optimal caching configuration ensures that your pages load as fast as possible.

You are also able to track the performance of your website and keep an eye on all the metrics that matter most, ensuring that you don't miss a chance to prevent unfortunate events from creeping up on you.

The resource management platform offers you easy scalability to meet your website traffic needs and automated flyover guarantees you that if a hardware issue arises, your site is automatically switched to another server.

All these, alongside a data mirroring service that automatically makes three copies of your data, ensure safety, redundancy, and gives you peace of mind as to the uptime of your websites.

With HostGator's cPanel, you can create new email accounts, manage subdomains, and more with just a few clicks.

Unmetered bandwidth & disk space are made available for smooth website hosting, coupled with local caching, unlimited parked domains, and are assured of a 99.9% uptime with $200 worth of search engine marketing credits.

Pricing

10. Dreamhost

Best Cloud Hosting Solutions For Advanced Developers

DreamHost is a cloud hosting service that offers you the sufficient advanced features, speed, full root, and full control needed to wholly take care of your website hosting needs.

A customizable and intuitive control panel gives you extended administrative access to all of your DreamHost products.

One-click installation of web applications, a high uptime guarantee, multiple datacenter locations, redundant server cooling, and constant server monitoring, are also provided to you to keep your websites up and at optimal performance at all times.

The cloud servers make use of SSD storage, meaning that with your website, caching, and database queries are possibly 2X faster than regular HDDs.

DreamHost offers two solutions to individuals looking for cloud hosting services; DreamCompute and DreamObjects.

With the DreamCompute solution, you can design your server to meet your unique needs and maintain unparalleled speed thanks to its SSD storage disks, accelerated networks, and next-generation processors.

Full root access to and full control of unmanaged cloud servers ensure that your choices in operating systems or software remain extended. Servers can be run on Linux, BSD, and Microsoft operating systems.

You can change your server automatically with requests through an OpenStack-compatible API via command-line tools and common programming libraries.

With the DreamObjects solution, you get to enjoy virtually limitless, seamless access to objects, and secure WordPress backups.

Through this solution, DreamHost lets you secure your files with cloud backups using QNAP, NextCloud/OwnCloud, CloudBerry, DropShare, Retrospect, and other popular cloud-backup apps.

Your WordPress website backups can also be automated and you can upload images and use shortcode to display images using the DreamObjects Connection plugin.

Customer support, through an in-house staff and service team, is made available to you 24/7.

Issues are attended to by real human beings, not bots and you can choose between getting customer support, a self-service option by reading through its knowledge base or starting a thread in the community forum.

Pricing

You can enjoy a 30-day free trial with the DreamObjects plans.

11. Liquid Web

Optimized For Small And Medium-Sized Businesses

Liquid Web has been helping to run regular content-related websites, ecommerce websites, and applications since it was founded in 1997.

The 10 global data centers run by Liquid Web ensure that your websites load as fast as possible from anywhere around the world.

Liquid Web presents simplified cloud hosting solutions for small and medium-sized businesses and allows you to deploy an enterprise-grade cloud hosting environment with just a few clicks.

Private VMware cloud servers, as well as dedicated cloud servers, offer you a single-tenant, on-demand dedicated infrastructure with a worthy environment to run your cloud hosting activities, no matter how large they are.

You can design a custom, multi-tenant platform and also enjoy its multi-server environments with managed file replication options to ensure the utmost uptime of your websites.

Liquid Web is certified by major security and service regulatory bodies such as HIPAA and PCI, assuring you of secured and reliable cloud hosting solutions.

Cloud servers are also fully managed by Liquid Web's Most Helpful Humans in Hosting™, helping you to avoid the learning curve and complexity involved in getting used to public cloud hosting.

You are helped in the configuration and deployment of your servers and the management of your entire server infrastructure.

For large or special business needs, customer support agents and advisors can help you in building your infrastructure to suit your needs from scratch.

Powerful API, integrated firewall, highly redundant storage, and Acronis backups are also included in your cloud hosting package.

Liquid Web is built on OpenStack technology, making it sufficient for high-demand websites and apps.

Pricing

Pricing is shared between three plans; Standard, Professional, and Premier.

You can also request a quote for special business needs.

12. Hostinger

Extremely Affordable Cloud Hosting Provider With Google Service Integrations

Hostinger is a website hosting platform that offers you multiple services and solutions provided from multiple data centers across the world.

With its cloud hosting, and if you really want to harness the power offered by Hostinger, you can get to enjoy and manage up to 300 websites on fast cloud servers powered by 600GB of SSD storage, 16GB of RAM, and 8 powerful CPU Cores

A free email address and free domain are provided to you alongside free SSL certificates for website protection and daily automatic backups to keep your websites from irretrievably falling off the internet.

You get to enjoy unlimited bandwidth for your website traffic, make money through Google Ads Credit, and also manage unlimited databases and dedicated resources from your server management dashboard.

Migration from other hosting services is completed free of charge and you have access to a Cloudflare CDN Integration and a cache manager, alongside a chance to host and manage up to 100 email accounts with your websites on Hostinger’s powerful control panel.

Applications can be installed using a one-click installer and Hostinger guarantees your websites a 99.9% uptime, 24/7/365 Support, up to 6GB database size, 200 entry processes, and 400 active processes running at the same time.

Pricing

You can enjoy a 30-day money-back guarantee on all plans.

13. AWS

Cloud Host With Individually Purchasable Features

AWS is a hosting service owned by eCommerce giant, Amazon, to provide website owners with a multitude of cloud hosting solutions to keep websites at optimum speed and performance.

With AWS, you get to explore more than 100 different products and solutions for hosting your websites and three different types of free offers are available, depending on the product or service you decide to use.

The different products present different benefits to you and you can pick or make use of only the products you need for your cloud hosting activities.

These different solutions include Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon API gateway, Chime, Appstream 2.0, Cognito, and CloudFront, among a lot others.

The Amazon CloudWatch service presents you with custom metrics and alarms for proper monitoring of your cloud resources and applications hosted on AWS.

You can take advantage of machine learning capabilities that can be beneficial for technical data scientists and developers and you have access to intelligent threat detection features and continuous monitoring to protect your AWS accounts and workloads from external and internal attacks.

You can receive up to 1 million API calls per month on the Amazon API Gateway and the Amazon Chime solution serves as a unified communications service that offers seamless online meetings with exceptional audio and video quality.

The Amazon CloudFront solution gives you the ability to distribute or load your website content to end-users with low latency and high data transfer speeds.

Amazon Comprehend Medical helps you to extract relevant medical information from unstructured text through machine learning and the Amazon Connect solution is a simple-to-use, cloud-based contact center that scales to support your business size as it grows.

All these and a lot more are provided by AWS to give you a comprehensive list of advanced website management features that can be used in any combination you wish.

Pricing

You have access to AWS' solutions through a PAYG mode of payment, based on the solutions you wish to use.

14. Google Cloud

Great Hosting Solution For Low To Medium Traffic Websites

Google Cloud, as the name may suggest, is a cloud hosting service owned by Google, that provides you with a series of solutions for hosting your websites.

Preconfigured and easily deployable cloud servers are made available to you to bring your websites to life as well as WordPress hosting on its cloud computing engine.

You can deploy WordPress to Google Cloud and have access to a range of hosting options.

Google Cloud serves as a suiting solution for blogs, simple websites, and other low to medium traffic webpages on the internet.

You get an open-source content management system and a LAMP stack on Google Cloud's cloud compute Engine.

Focus on coding, not infrastructure as Google Cloud's fully managed platform scales automatically as your hosting needs change.

You can improve your stack from the Google Cloud marketplace and create your own infrastructure manually.

Complete control and unlimited flexibility are offered through configurable servers and virtual machines with defined but sufficient memory, SSD, and GPU resources.

Google Cloud also offers automatic load balancing, logging, and server monitoring options to keep your websites up at all times.

You have machine learning capabilities and a Vertex AI training feature allows you to train your machine learning models in the cloud with various frameworks.

All these alongside language detection and translation, text-to-speech options, cloud GPUs for machine learning, scientific computing, and 3D visualization are also provided by Google Cloud alongside many more.

Pricing

Google Cloud also runs on a PAYG model and you are charged based on the solutions you wish to use, ranging from AI and machine learning capabilities to API management, data analytics, developer tools, and many more.

What is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud hosting is a form of website hosting where multiple servers, instead of one, are used to host your website.

Multiple, different servers are used to host your website with a primary aim to balance the traffic load and maximize your website uptime.

Instead of using a single server, your website can tap into a cluster of servers that make use of resources from a centralized pool.

Cloud hosting allows you to spread your data across multiple, interconnected servers, located across a wide geographical area rather than hosting your website or app on a single machine, like regular website hosting.

Servers exist in a virtual environment and not physically, hence the name “cloud” is prefixed to it and as more machines are hooked up to the network, more resources are added to the overall cloud immediately, to be capable of handling the traffic.

With cloud hosting, you get a part of the expandable cluster of servers, as opposed to traditional web hosting where you get a certain amount of space from a single server.

Utilizing the computing strength of numerous machines, you have more potential and power than you would through traditional hosting and you also have access to the services those machines offer.

The idea of cloud hosting, however, doesn't stop there.

You can either get public cloud hosting services or private cloud hosting services.

Public cloud hosting is more like shared hosting but you get to avoid the downside of being limited by shared disk space and processing power.

Resources are fenced and you only share the same servers and reduced pricing with other users.

Private cloud hosting, on the other hand, offers you more control and security, if you are ready to pay for it.

What are the Benefits of Cloud Hosting?

1. Adaptable Pricing Structure

In other types of hosting, service providers make you pay a monthly rate regardless of whether you utilize all of the server resources or not.

With cloud hosting, it is different.

You only pay for what you use, so, if you’re expecting a temporary surge in traffic on your website, you don’t have to completely upgrade your paid package.

All you need to do is scale your server resources up during the traffic surge and down once traffic levels are back to normal.

Instead of having to pay for a high hosting fee across the board, which may give you more than what you need for a higher price, your pricing is determined by the total amount of server resources you’re using.

2. Easy Server Management

Most cloud servers offer you access to an intuitive and comprehensive website management dashboard that allows you to view your website’s performance in real-time.

You can scale server resources up or down on the spot without having to wait for approval from your hosting service provider.

3. Your Website Never Goes Down

Other types of hosting help your website stay alive with the use of only one server. If something unfortunate were to happen to that server, then your site would go offline and remain offline until that server is fixed.

When you make use of cloud hosting, your website will be moved over by an existing virtual backup server within seconds upon the occurrence of an unfortunate event.

Cloud hosting providers usually have a concurrent live version of your website that can be loaded immediately on the new server.

The ability to scale server resources on demand also ensures that your website won’t go offline because of an unexpected traffic surge.

4. Speedy Server Setup Process

Cloud hosting ensures that you can quickly deploy a cloud server and your website comes alive in record time.

With shared hosting, for example, it might take some time to deploy your web server if you are not registering as a beginner.

This becomes a problem if you need your site online quickly or you are migrating your website and you have to wait for a server to be ready.

5. No Hardware Issues With Your Servers

Cloud hosting keeps your website protected from any physical server issues including problems like hacking, hardware failure, or system overload.

When a cloud or virtual server is compromised or experiencing an issue, you can simply use the resources of another server without experiencing any downtime whatsoever.

6. Faster Website Speed and Performance

Cloud hosting allows for easier traffic load balancing between multiple server environments.

This can help to put much less strain on a single server’s resources and a lot of cloud hosting providers offer you these fast website load speeds.

Who is Cloud Hosting For?

Cloud hosting is an extremely flexible hosting solution and, as a result, is available and sufficient for multiple sizes of websites; from those used by enterprise-level organizations to individuals who run low traffic websites.

Making use of cloud hosting is good for :

1. Individuals Who Experience High Traffic or Temporary Traffic Spikes

Cloud hosting is a great fit for website owners that experience a decent level of temporary traffic spikes that tend to slow down their websites, or even bring them offline.

Even though virtual private servers and dedicated servers can be of great use if you are getting higher levels of traffic on your website, cloud hosting is the best cost-effective option that gives you proper scalability.

2. Business Owners Unsure Of Their Business' Growth

A lot of top cloud hosting providers in the market present you with a long list of pricing plans and schemes that offer you great scalability no matter the amount of traffic your website receives or the number of resources required to run your website.

You can get cloud servers with minimum specs for very low prices in case you are not expecting your website to blow up immediately and server resources can be easily scaled up as your needs increase.

Prices are then determined on a PAYG model and you only pay for what you need.

3. Businesses That Need Perfect Uptime

For websites with high website hosting needs, cloud hosting can be great if you need to have near-perfect uptime and want to grow their servers as they see fit, without experiencing any delay.

Streaming services and other platforms with constant traffic need to be available to be accessed by their users to keep their service rating up and cloud hosting can be the only cost-effective solution to take care of this.

Working with a high-quality cloud hosting provider, you can have solid security, stand-by servers for easy and swift load balancing, as well as very speedy site performance.

4. Startups Looking To Purchase Their First Server

Despite the popular orientation that cloud hosting is only a great choice for websites that are experiencing an increasing inflow of traffic, it can also be a great choice if you are just starting off your online journey.

Starting off your online journey, you need to plan for the success of your website.

Getting used to the services of a top cloud hosting provider before you actually have no other choice is a great way to start.

When the need to make use of a cloud server comes, you don't need to worry about fighting against time in giving your websites the speed, uptime, and performance they need to keep your visitors happy.

5. Businesses That Need A Backup Plan To Avoid Losing Website Configurations

Cloud hosting providers offer quality backup services that help you prevent the total loss of your website in case of an unfortunate event.

Services like website duplication and caching are only a few of the little features you can enjoy through cloud hosting, remaining worry-free in your website management activities.

These providers also operate multiple centers situated at different geographical locations to make sure that one unfortunate event cannot affect you in any way.

6. Businesses With Limited Resources To Invest In On-site Hosting

An on-site server can give your websites the dedicated resources needed to keep running at utmost speed and performance, however, they are usually expensive.

Cloud hosting providers can offer you great prices and even easy scalability in case your needs grow and your current server is not buffed up with enough resources.

Cloud hosting is great for companies like Netflix, which demand high performance, bandwidth, and 100% uptime, all the way down to startups that are just starting to scale their traffic levels and services.

How is Cloud Hosting Different from Other Types of Web Hosting?

Cloud Hosting shares a lot of similarities with the other different types of website hosting offered by service providers.

However, regardless of this, there are still differences split along thin lines.

Cloud Hosting vs Shared Hosting

Shared website hosting is the cheapest, most popular, and most widely available type of hosting solution in the market and you will usually see it advertised for very low prices.

The major difference between shared and cloud hosting lies in how the servers in each hosting method are organized.

Shared hosting makes use of a single server with multiple websites on them and website hosting providers build, maintain these servers, and place a bunch of websites from different users on them.

This means if your website is hosted on a shared server, it is making use of and fighting for the same resources as many other websites owned by other users.

A ton of websites can be packed onto each server and this can seriously throttle your website's speed, performance and, even worse, present some limitations in security.

This means that your website could perform poorly if another website on the same server is taking up too many resources to run.

Cloud hosting is great for you if you experience high traffic or spikes in visits or if you need in-depth security features which are dedicated to you only.

For eCommerce businesses or other businesses with high traffic demands, cloud hosting is great for you as you can maintain an optimum website speed at all times through automatic resource allocations.

Cloud hosting is more expensive, which makes it better for larger sites in the long run, while shared hosting is a great choice for those with a very tight budget or individuals who are planning on keeping their websites very small.

There are, however, similarities between public cloud hosting and shared hosting.

Server resources are shared between multiple users in both types of hosting but, with public cloud hosting, resources are fenced.

Fenced resources mean that every user has his own expandable space on the cluster of servers and a user making use of a lot of server resources will not affect other users making use of the same cluster of servers.

Unlike shared hosting where each user is affected by the other, public cloud hosting, which is cheaper than private cloud hosting, makes users affected by only the amount of server resources they use.

Cloud Hosting vs Dedicated Hosting

A dedicated server is a physical server that is purchased or rented solely for your own business or website needs.

They are typically used by organizations that require high levels of website performance, security, and organization.

Cloud and dedicated servers are very similar, not only in the speed and performance they offer but also in how much they cost.

Private cloud servers can be set up to provide the levels of performance, security, and control that are similar to those of a dedicated server.

However, instead of being hosted on physical hardware that is solely used by you, they reside in a virtualized environment that is managed by your cloud hosting provider.

With public cloud servers, you benefit from the cost-effective advantage of sharing servers with other customers and you only pay for the exact amount of server resources used.

Unlike the fixed nature of dedicated servers, cloud servers also allow you to scale resources up or down, depending on your traffic demand, meaning you don’t have to pay for an extra expensive server just to expand your server resources.

Businesses with variable website demands and workloads often find that cloud servers are an ideal fit due to the scalability offered by providers.

Also, unlike cloud servers, dedicated servers still need IT capacity and expertise to take care of maintenance, patches, and upgrades.

The infrastructure of servers in cloud hosting can be both multi-tenant and single-tenant while dedicated servers only offer a single-tenant server infrastructure.

A multi-tenant infrastructure allows reduced pricing but also proffers security risks for users making use of the same servers.

However, with a choice to use a single-tenant infrastructure through private cloud hosting, you can avoid this.

Cloud Hosting vs WordPress Hosting

WordPress hosting is a type of hosting that is specifically optimized to run WordPress services.

With WordPress, you have pre-installed or one-click installation options, meaning you don't have to deal with complex codes, configurations, and firewall setups.

Some of the best WordPress hosting services also make use of cloud servers or integrate them with cloud hosting, helping to merge the features of WordPress with the benefits of cloud hosting together.

When it comes to performance, WordPress hosting, without cloud servers, offers you a limited number of resources that cannot be scaled up or exceeded.

Of course, this is different with cloud hosting, as you get the option to adjust your resources according to the traffic you get on your site.

However, making use of cloud servers for your WordPress hosting can offer you this cherished scalability related to cloud hosting.

WordPress hosting and cloud hosting also offer you the same level of security if you make use of public servers.

Your website would be spread out on various servers, but these servers are shared with other websites and, if any one of the sites on that server is compromised for security, your website is at risk too.

With private cloud hosting, however, you get to avoid these security issues and, like it was said before, you can also get private cloud servers for your WordPress hosting activities.

You also have the option of making use of shared or dedicated servers to run your WordPress hosting activities.

When it comes to pricing, making use of cloud servers is the only way you can have access to a pay-as-you-use pricing scheme for your WordPress hosting.

With other types of WordPress hosting, you need to buy the whole package no matter the number of resources you plan on using to run your websites.

Cloud Hosting vs VPS

Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting means, like regular shared hosting, you share a physical server with other users, however, your resources are fenced just like a public cloud server.

Everyone gets their own share of a single physical server, as resources are divided up in advance and no one is affected by how much cloud resources other users use.

A software divides up a server multiple times into different segments called ‘virtual servers’, which are programmed to act as standalone servers.

Users use one of these segments independently of the others, as each exists without exchanging data or having file access between accounts.

However, because one physical server is split into several virtual servers, there are finite resources that cannot be exceeded.

With these, cloud servers evidently offer more benefits than a VPS.

A VPS is segmented from one physical server, whereas cloud hosting involves a cluster of physical servers from which each user gets their allocation.

Cloud hosting typically offers higher performance and reliability and you also enjoy scalability with much more potential for growth.

A VPS is always shared with other users, meaning there will always be security risks.

However, cloud hosting offers private servers that can be used to host only your own websites.

If you use a lot of resources to keep your websites at optimum performance, then cloud hosting would be the most suitable, cost-effective choice.

It is more affordable in the long run and when your website traffic isn't as great as it usually is, you can easily scale your resources down to avoid high costs.

How to Choose the Best Cloud Web Hosting Plan?

Every business is unique and has specific requirements which are determined by marketing strategies and plans on growing.

Cloud hosting is a great choice for powering your websites but, today, what cloud hosting providers have to offer goes beyond just cloud servers and you don’t need to limit yourself in this regard.

Here are a few things to look into while choosing a cloud host and after checking your specific website hosting needs:

1. Check For Certifications And Standards

The security and reliability of the cloud servers with which your websites or applications are hosted is one thing you would want to pay great attention to.

A lot of cloud service providers are in the market today and only providers that are known to comply with recognized standards and quality frameworks can guarantee you this much-needed reliability and security.

While standards may not be the main determinant of the cloud hosting service provider you choose, they can help in shortlisting potential providers that you can, at least, trust.

There are multiple standards and certifications available and, for example, quality cloud servers and infrastructure is indicated by certifications from regulatory bodies like DMTF, ISO, and ETSI, among others, are what you should look for.

If security is a priority to you, look for providers that are accredited with certifications from top regulatory bodies like CSA, ISO, and PCI.

Certifications from providers like ITIL and ISO are great indications for proper operations within the provider’s service provision.

These certifications are indications for structured processes, effective data management, and good knowledge management.

2. Check Out The Features And Solutions Offered

Make sure that the cloud service provider’s platform and collection of features align with your current environment and support your website cloud hosting needs and objectives.

Ask yourself if the provider’s cloud architectures, standards, and services suit your website traffic, workloads, and management preference.

Also assess how much re-coding or customization you may need to embark on to make the platform suitable for your workload if customization is a choice.

Some of the most important features offered by a cloud service provider include;

SSD-powered cloud servers for faster website performance, Cloudflare CDN Integration, caching, dedicated IP, free SSL certificates, and free domain and domain management options.

AI and Machine learning capabilities are also important to look out for if you want to enjoy easy-to-use, advanced cloud management.

API management features allow you to add extra functionality and control to your website management and data analytics allows you to easily monitor servers and pinpoint parts of your management activities that need improvement.

3. Make Sure Your Information Is Properly Secured

Take note of the cloud provider’s levels of data and system security as well as the maturity of security operations and security governance processes.

The security controls or protocols put in place by the cloud hosting provider should demonstrably support and align with your own security policies and processes, ensuring that there are no areas left unprotected and vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

Compliance with regulatory standards like the ISO 27000 series or other certifications, is a great preemptive indication as to how protected your website resources and personal information are.

Assess a cloud provider’s security and data management policies particularly relating to how your data is protected and ensure there are sufficient guarantees around data access, data location, confidentiality, and usage /ownership rights.

Properly check through backup and resilience provisions and review how your data is treated if you decide to leave.

You can also look for internal security audit reports, incident reports, evidence of how they have solved these problems, and further evidence of the effectiveness of preventive measures for future breaches.

Reviews from other users on the internet are great for getting information about how secure the cloud hosting services of a provider are.

DDoS defense, SSH keys, and cloud firewalls are also important features to look out for in the security aspect of managing your cloud servers.

4. Reliability And Performance Is Important

The reliability of your cloud service provider is the most important in ensuring that your website visitors have access to your websites every time and here are several methods of checking the reliability of a service provider.

You can check the performance of the service provider against their SLAs for the previous 6-12 months as some service providers publish this information.

Downtime is inevitable and, one time or the other, every cloud provider will experience it, however, the frequency of downtimes experienced by a provider should be looked out for.

A 99.95% guarantee of uptime is the least you should settle for and you should not rely on what a service provider says on its website but what other experienced users have to say about it.

Alongside monitoring and reporting tools that can be used by you to prevent problems by yourself, ensure that your chosen provider has effective processes for dealing with planned and unplanned downtime issues

How the provider deals with downtime issues also counts.

Be aware of the remedies and liability limitations offered by the cloud provider when an unfortunate and costly service issue arises and also try to look for a cloud service provider with ample backup servers and services like website duplication, among others.

5. Check For Migration Support

“Vendor lock-in” is a situation in which a customer using a product or service cannot easily transfer or transition to a competitor.

Vendor lock-in can be a result of proprietary technologies that are incompatible with those of your preferred service provider or contract constraints, among other things.

Mistakes are made, not all cloud service providers provide the best services for your business, and making sure that it doesn’t impact your portability to other providers is important.

Avoid the risk of vendor lock-in by ensuring your chosen provider does not limit your ability to migrate or transition away by the use of cumbersome processes.

Cloud Web Hosting Services FAQ

Ready to Use Cloud Hosting to Auto-Scale Your Website?

Cloud hosting is one of the most efficient methods of hosting your websites, with the amount of cost-effective flexibility, scalability, and reliability it offers to your website management activities.

However, there are a lot of service providers in the market today and the value for money provided by each differs.

Some of the best in the market today include A2 Hosting, Cloudways, and Kamatera.

A2 Hosting offers you the best value for money, with its main focus placed on providing you with quality customer service and security options to keep your cloud servers online.

Cloudways is a cloud hosting service that offers you multiple integrations with other cloud service providers and also, extended cloud hosting features like multiple ready-to-use caches, and auto-healing servers.

Kamatera gives you complete control of your website hosting activities and also makes dedicated servers for specific purposes like email, VoIP, and CRM available to you.

Checking out these cloud service providers and picking the one that best suits your website hosting needs would help you gain the most advantage from cloud hosting.

Was This Article Helpful?