Cloud web hosting can be exactly what your company needs if your website is outgrowing the standard hosting solution you’ve been using for years. Your data is dispersed across a virtual network of servers—a cloud environment—instead of a single server when you use cloud hosting.
What Is Cloud Hosting?
All of your website’s resources are housed on a single server with traditional web hosting. It is possible for the server to be entirely devoted to the resources of your website (dedicated hosting services) or to host multiple websites at once (shared hosting services). The issue with shared and dedicated hosting is that if the server is compromised or goes down, your website could suffer serious consequences or even cease to exist.
How Do Cloud Hosts Operate?
The flexibility and scalability you may achieve in the cloud is enormously increased by a pool of computers sharing resources like CPU, RAM, and storage. Because cloud hosting includes redundancy, the likelihood that your website will go offline or operate poorly due to a hardware issue is significantly reduced.
Some cloud hosting companies even promise an uptime of 99.999% or higher, which equates to fewer than six minutes of downtime annually.
How to Pick a Reputable Cloud Hosting Company
The cloud hosting company that completely satisfies your specific business needs is the ideal choice for you. Your needs now and your long-term objectives should both be taken into account while evaluating cloud hosting services.
Some benefits of cloud hosting, including free migration and domains, are nice-to-have extras but aren’t necessarily required. When picking a service, other features like security and consistent uptime are non-negotiable.
When selecting a cloud hosting service, we advise you to pay particular attention to data storage, speed and performance, security, cost, and customer support.
Data Storage
Users should be aware of the amount of storage that is offered and how simple or challenging it is to scale up or down as needed before signing a hosting agreement. On the provider’s website, these terms should be plainly stated and accessible to anyone reviewing its services.
Some web hosts, like HostGator, MochaHost, and TMDHosting, give limitless storage. Other hosting providers provide beginner plans with 25GB to 50GB of storage but higher tier plans with extended capacity ranging from 100GB to 16TB.
You can get in touch with a provider directly to find out how much it would cost to add more storage if you think you might need more than what is specified in its regular plans. Most businesses provide more storage as an add-on.
Speed and Performance
The performance and speed of a website are affected by a number of variables. The main cause of sluggish websites is poor website design, but other elements, including insufficient CPU power, can also have a detrimental effect on how users interact with your website.
For the majority of small to medium-sized websites, HostGator offers three plans with two to six CPU cores each. The highest plans from InterServer and SiteGround both have a CPU core limit of 16, which makes these solution providers ideal for websites that require a lot of data.
Speed and performance of a website can also be significantly impacted by RAM capacity. Generally speaking, a speedier site has more memory. This is crucial for websites that host massive file collections.
A great example of a cloud hosting provider that allows you to scale memory based on your demands is IONOS. While the IONOS top plan offers 48GB of RAM, the IONOS starting plan only offers 512MB.
Security
Your website needs top-notch hosting security whether it is used for small-scale blogging or major business initiatives. An SSL certificate is a prerequisite, but you also need to consider the hosting providers’ track record for compliance and cloud security measures.
Look for details such as data encryption standards, user identity authentication, data protection for data in transit and at rest, and cloud server firewalls. Choose a service provider that provides integrated tools and reliable procedures for defending against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, worms, viruses, spyware, and other security risks to your website.
Pricing Plans
Pricing for cloud hosting should always be open and simple, with plans being simple to browse and contrast. Users must choose the features they require, the level of scalability they desire, and the contract structure that will work best for them.
Customer Support
Every hosting company will boast about its top-notch customer service, but users need to go farther during the investigation stage. Does claimed 24/7 service include live support? Chat? Video? Phone? The sorts that are available might make a huge difference.
Best Cloud Hosting Services 2023
- Hostinger – Most bang for your buck
- Scala Hosting – Best cloud hosting for custom resource allocation
- Cloudways – Best customizable managed cloud hosting
- HostGator– Best cheap cloud web hosting
- DreamHost– Best cloud hosting for developers
- SiteGround – Best cloud hosting for scaling resources
- A2 Hosting – Fastest cloud web hosting
- InMotion – Best cloud hosting for small businesses
