Best Cloud Hosting Services
- Digg readers get $300 plus an extra $50 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads for 90 days
- IaaS, PaaS and serverless computing services
- Modular cloud services and pricing model
- Wide variety of programming languages supported for deploying applications
- Compute Engine supports Windows and Linux virtual machines
- GUI functionality facilitates setup process
Cloud hosting services are an increasingly popular tool for businesses of all sizes. Compared to traditional web hosting options, cloud hosting is more secure, reliable and scalable. As technology improves, you also don't need to change any hardware — the hosting company can simply make changes to its cloud infrastructure.
However, with so many cloud hosting platforms available today, it can feel overwhelming to figure out which one is right for your business. To help you find the right hosting provider for you, we've put together a list of our top picks for the best cloud hosting services.
Our Top Picks for Best Cloud Hosting Services
- Kamatera: Best For Affordable Prices
- Cloudways: Best For Custom Plans
- Kinsta: Best For Managed WordPress Hosting
- Heroku: Best For Extra Add-Ons
- HostGator: Best For Unmetered Storage
Best Cloud Hosting Services Reviews
Best for Affordable Prices: Kamatera
Why we chose it: Kamatera's price calculator helps you set a price according to the exact resources you need, making its cloud hosting accessible to almost anyone.
Instead of price tiers, Kamatera has a price calculator that helps you configure your plan to your exact needs, then sets your price accordingly. The factors that influence Kamatera's service include:
- Hosting subtype
- Processors
- Storage size
- RAM
- Monthly bandwidth
- Number of public IPs
- Operating systems
- Data centers
- Control panels
- Add-ons
As of March 2023, pricing starts at $4 per month with 20 GB of storage, 1024 MB of RAM and servers based on availability. Your monthly price can be as high as $3,950 if you get the most RAM (524,288 MB) and SSD storage (4,000 GB), which are available on its dedicated servers. You can also select whether you want to bill on a monthly or hourly basis, which not many providers allow.
Kamatera ensures its servers run reliably by only using storage arrays based on SSD hard drives or including SSD accelerators. The company employs security measures like creating redundancies for each server element and every server. It also boasts an impressive 99.9% uptime guarantee, which means you get a refund if services aren't available for at least eight hours over a service year.
Kamatera's Control Panel is intuitive and easy to use for those familiar with cloud hosting. Customers can quickly change their server configuration — adjusting things like CPU, Ram, server capacity and firewalls — on their own when necessary.
One downside to Kamatera is that daily back-ups cost extra. The company provides a lot of self-service options, but this can make it harder for first-time site owners to learn how to use it, and the self-help options for troubleshooting issues are lacking. As a result, you may want to start elsewhere if you're new to web hosting services.
Best for Custom Plans: Cloudways
Why we chose it: Cloudways offers many pay-as-you-go pricing options and partners with multiple hosting providers to give you flexible plan choices.
Cloudways works a bit differently from other hosting services. Instead of using its own infrastructure, you can choose to use any of its five partnered hosting providers: Digital Ocean, AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr and Linode. You can choose from a wide variety of servers with each provider — a level of customizability that stands out from other cloud hosting options.The AWS and Google Cloud servers are the most expensive but also the most reliable since they're backed by the companies themselves.
Cloudways' plans are all pay-as-you-go, which means that if you only use a server for two days, you don't pay for the whole month. Every plan also comes with 24/7/365 support and unlimited app installation.
Cloudways' WordPress tools boost page load speeds for websites you build on the platform. Having round-the-clock access to the standard Cloudways support team with any plan is a plus, although advanced support add-ons carry a hefty monthly price. You'll also need to purchase an add-on if you want domain or email hosting, and the price increases with the number of emails you need.
There is no cap on the number of websites you can launch, but Cloudways provides fewer server locations and more limited root access to users compared to other hosting options. However, the competitive market rates for pay-as-you-go web hosting and the ability to choose a plan with your preferred provider make it the best choice for customization.
Best for Managed WordPress Hosting: Kinsta
Why we chose it: Kinsta's many powerful WordPress plugins make it perfect for WordPress-based sites that need consistent high performance.
Kinsta Cloud Hosting has garnered a reputation with users for helping their WordPress sites run faster than with its competitors. The host's Managed WordPress hosting service is uniquely configured for WordPress sites, especially for e-commerce. It also boasts a number of WordPress plugins and tools, like automatically migrating your site into Kinsta for free.
Kinsta's Managed WordPress plan offers a free CDN, which boosts site performance by caching static assets like images in data centers, which means your server sends less information when someone opens your site. If uptime falls under 99.9%, the host will refund users in service credits. Kinsta is also highly secure, using features like wildcard SSLs and DDoS protection.
As of March 2023, the most inexpensive tier starts at $7 per month and is best for web applications. The next tier is good if you need to host databases and starts at $18 monthly. For WordPress, you need to pay for the highest tier, which starts at $35 per month.
If you have a team, it's easy to define permissions and roles at both the company and site levels. However, Kinsta doesn't offer email hosting, so you'll need to find an email host for your team elsewhere. Kinsta also doesn't service other CMSs besides WordPress, and it doesn't have an option for phone support — though it does feature 24/7 "fast chat support" in multiple languages.
Best for Extra Add-Ons: Heroku
Why we chose it: Heroku's dynamic scaling and extensive library of free add-ons make it a solid cloud platform that many users find appealing.
Heroku aims to facilitate app development, so it provides a single window platform to support all programming languages. This makes it easy to deploy and manage apps written in Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Scala, Clojure and Go. It also includes a variety of free pre-configured build packs and add-ons that enhance your server's functionality so you can design the service to work best for you.
Some of Heroku's top add-ons include:
- Pingdom: Website monitoring tool to learn more about your site's user experience in real time
- AutoIdle: Automatically puts staging and review apps to sleep when not in use so you only pay for what you're actively using
- Papertrail: Log management tool that helps seamlessly search through all your logs
- Fastly: Content delivery platform that's quicker than traditional CDNs and can purge website caches at 150 milliseconds or less
There's zero-downtime deployment, so you don't need to take down your server to deploy new apps. Note that some of the add-ons are only available for purchase. Also, while customers report 99.99% uptime with Heroku, the provider doesn't have an uptime guarantee.
Because costs are based on the containers (or "dynos") your application uses and how long you run them for, Heroku's pricing can be expensive compared to its competitors. Its pricing page includes a cost estimator you can try out for its four tiers — as of March 2023, these start at $5, $25 and $250 monthly. The final tier covers custom pricing for enterprises.
There is no phone support for most plans, but Heroku does offer the option to create a help ticket. However, there is 24/7 support if you choose the Premium Support option.
Best for Unmetered Storage: HostGator
Why we chose it: HostGator offers unlimited bandwidth and disk space, granting unlimited website traffic at affordable prices.
HostGator offers unmetered storage and bandwidth on all of its plans, meaning you don't have additional charges for using extra space — though no customer may exceed 25% of Hostgator's system resources for more than 90 seconds. Every plan also guarantees 99.9% uptime: if you're unhappy with your service, you can cancel any plan within the first 30 days for a full refund of your hosting fees.
As of March, HostGator has three price tiers. The lowest starts at $5 per month, the next is $6 and the final one is just under $10. The website limit for each plan is one, five and unlimited, respectively.
HostGator offers many add-ons, though they can quickly add up. You have to pay extra for domain privacy and automated backups. Customers also warn in reviews that the checkout process pushes you to get add-ons you don't actually need — an SSL upgrade for example.
Online reviews seem divided on HostGator's 24/7 customer support — many say it's very reliable, but others say they waited days for a response. However, most agreed that HostGator makes it easy to set up a website, especially for beginners.
Other Cloud Hosting Services We Considered
The following web hosts didn't quite make it to our top list, but are still good choices worth mentioning.
DreamHost
DreamHost is a good, affordable option if you want unmetered storage. In March 2023, a basic plan for $5 monthly gets you a 512 MB RAM server. The $12 plan is the next tier up, offering 2 GB RAM, and the $48 plan offers a server with 8 GB RAM.
Why DreamHost didn't make the cut: Customer support isn't available around the clock. Additionally, DreamHost's malware protection costs extra.
Nexcess
Nexcess is a managed WordPress hosting service that has unique offerings compared to its competitors. For example, you don't encounter visit limits, which many other WordPress hosting services impose.
Why Nexcess didn't make the cut: Nexcess' plan offerings can be confusing, like how email hosting is free at the lowest tier even though higher tiers don't provide it. In addition to lackluster support, a complicated dashboard for beginners and missing standard features like an in-browser file manager kept the host out of our top list.
WP Engine
WP Engine is a powerful managed hosting option. Its many WordPress-specific features can significantly improve the performance of your website.
Why WP Engine didn't make the cut: WP Engine is difficult for beginner and intermediate users to navigate. With a $20/mo entry-level plan, it's also one of the more expensive hosting providers.
Cloud Hosting Services Guide
What Are Cloud Hosting Services?
Cloud hosting services provide multiple virtual machines called cloud servers, instead of a physical server, to host your website. Unlike traditional web hosting, which stores several sites on a single server at one time, cloud hosting services split your data across many servers. This has four main benefits:
- High availability: If one cloud server fails, the others can compensate to keep your site running. This means your site will have fewer crashes than with traditional web hosting.
- Traffic load balancing: As more visitors are on your site, the load gets divided across cloud servers. This helps your site perform smoothly under heavy traffic.
- Scalability: Your limit with cloud hosting is much higher than the storage, bandwidth or computing power one server can offer. Because of the virtual environment, additional resources are available to support your site's growth.
- Security: With so many servers, there are much fewer points of failure with cloud hosting. Protocols like load balancing also help prevent common problems that bad actors can cause, like DDoS attacks.
How Do Cloud Hosting Services Work?
Cloud hosting services create a network of connected virtual and physical cloud servers to host your website or application.
When you pay for hosting services, the host deploys your application or website on this cloud network instead of on an on-premises server. The company then scales the resources it dedicates to your site according to your chosen plan — whether that's a fixed plan or a custom one based on your needs.
What To Consider When Choosing A Cloud Hosting Provider
Pricing Structure
The two common pricing models for cloud hosting are fixed and dynamic.
Fixed-price models, like subscriptions or pay-per-use models, set a stable price for hosting. For example, many providers charge according to the amount of data you use each month. This model helps you clearly understand your monthly spending, though it's common to overpay or underpay for your needs.
Dynamic pricing models are much more flexible, so they're also called real-time price models. With this kind of model, a pricing mechanism helps calculate costs. These models may take into account different features, such as:
- Time
- Volume
- Priority
- Responsive (charging when the server has traffic)
- Amount of usage within a certain period
Cloud Storage Space
To figure out how much space you need, think of the type of content your site includes. If it's mostly text, like blogs and other articles, you need less storage and can probably find a good budget-friendly option.
However, if you mostly feature video content, you will need much more storage. As a general rule of thumb, you should have 150 GB of storage for every 100 GB of source data you back up, so you can estimate your storage needs according to how much data your site needs to hold. It's also helpful to check how much space websites similar to yours require.
CPU And RAM Capacity
CPU and RAM capacity determine how quickly your cloud server can process requests. More RAM means the server can store more current applications and process data without sacrificing performance. A faster CPU means this data is faster to process and translates to better overall speed and site performance.
However, as you increase CPU and RAM, you'll pay more, so it's best to figure out exactly how much you need. There are many ways to estimate your CPU and RAM requirements, but try to combine information from these sources:
- Past analytics from Google Analytics (if available)
- Stress testing
- Load testing
- Number of users expected
- Nature of your site and industry
Security Features
It's important to find a provider that responds quickly to cyberattacks. Moreover, as new hacks get discovered, it's vital to have some key security features to protect your site. Make sure your provider offers the following:
- Top-of-the-line perimeter firewall: Firewalls inspect an incoming signal's source and destination. Some more advanced versions have stable packet inspection, which checks for stability issues. Top-of-the-line firewalls offer even more granularity, checking the contents of the file packet to examine the file type, source, destination and integrity.
- Intrusion detection systems: Some cloud providers monitor their intrusion detection systems and update their firewall security rules to protect you from malicious IP addresses and threat signals. Intrusion detection and event-logging solutions are also requirements for most security compliance standards, like HIPAA or PCI.
- Internal firewalls for individual applications: A perimeter firewall blocks external attacks, but internal firewalls protect you internally by restricting access to sensitive information. For example, they limit the damage a disgruntled ex-employee or compromised employee account could do.
- Data-at-Rest Encryption: Encrypting the data stored on your cloud infrastructure can effectively keep your most sensitive information from being accessed by the wrong party. In the event there is a breach, it can minimize the risk of stolen data being used against your company or your customers before you have a chance to alert them.
- Tier IV data centers with strong physical security: Hackers may try to exploit the physical hardware running a cloud environment for access. With direct access to the hardware that runs the cloud, they can steal data or upload malware directly to your systems. Tier IV data centers protect cloud environments by restricting physical access with measures like armed security patrols, controlled-access checkpoints with biometric security controls and 24/7 CCTV monitoring.
Customer Support
No matter how reliable a service is, you will likely need to contact customer support at some point. Before signing up with a provider, check reviews and opinions of the company online to understand how previous users felt about its ability to solve their problems.
Which Hosting Features Should I Be Looking For?
The key hosting features you need to look for are:
- Security features: Ensure your cloud hosting provider provides quality security features like firewalls and intrusion detection systems.
- Pre-installed apps: Many hosts offer pre-installed apps that can help your cloud server better suit your needs.
- Domain names: Hosting plans usually include free domain name registration, though you should check if they permit you to transfer the domain to another registrar if you think you might go with a different web host.
- Uptime: This measures the percentage of time when your site is available to visitors. Hosts that offer closer to 100% uptime are ideal, as they usually use backup servers in multiple locations to avoid outages.
- Website speed: Google recommends ensuring that the main content on your site loads in under 2.5 seconds to retain the most visitors. It's important to find a host that enables quick page speeds with features like SSD servers and a content delivery network service.
- Website builder: If you don't have much programming experience, a quality website builder included in your hosting plan lets you easily design your own page.
- Backups: Website backups minimize downtime and data loss if there's a site outage.
- Support: Look for an excellent customer support base with 24/7 service through multiple channels, including calls, email, chatbots or live chat, forums and knowledge bases, so you don't have to stress when you have a problem you can't solve yourself.
Cloud Hosting Services FAQ
How We Chose The Best Cloud Hosting Services
To choose the best cloud hosting services, we compared companies on the following factors:
- Affordability of the pricing options
- Ease of setting up and using the service
- Availability of free and paid add-on features
- Customer reviews
- Uptime rates
- Availability and quality of customer support
