Cloud hosting is a relatively new hosting model which offers the scalability and flexibility of a dedicated server, but takes away the pain of configuring and managing your physical server. A cloud hosting environment consists of several virtual machines forming a cluster, all of which utilize a common pool of resources (CPU/RAM/Application etc) that are managed by the concerned hosting service provider. Thus a website, hosted on cloud, would have the luxury to utilize additional resources to handle any instantaneous traffic spike by distributing the load over several virtual machines available on the same cluster. On top of that, a website hosted on cloud will have redundant resources to rely on, hence it is bound to reduce your downtime to a significant extent.
1. HostingSource
HostingSource’s cloud hosting packages are broadly categorized in to two categories – Public Cloud and Private Cloud. Priced at $39 a month, the configuration of HostingSource’s entry level Public Cloud VPS package includes 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 100 GB Storage and 3000 GB Monthly Bandwidth limit along with your choice of Operating System (Any version of Windows/Linux). For larger businesses with higher resource-scaling and enhanced security requirements, HostingSource’s Private Cloud VPS plans would be the ideal match.
HostingSource Cloud VPS Hosting Key Features:
Full root or remote desktop access
Redundancy through RAID 10 architecture
High Availability through multinode cluster
Ability to customize the kernel
Many OS Choices. All versions of Linux and Windows.
Ability to scale capacity easily as resource requirements fluctuate.
HostingSource’s Backup Snapshots allow for data protection and rollback.
24/7 Phone and Email Support and online knowledge-base.
2. A2Hosting
A2Hosting’s Cloud VPS solution claims to speed up your page load time in the magnitude of over 300% – thanks to their trademark SwiftServer Platform which features ultra-speed Solid-State-Drive technology. At a starting price of $15 a month, they are pretty affordable as well. Being a quadruple redundant network, they offer automatic failover – which means if one, two or even three of their links were to go down, your website will still be up on the fourth node, thus helping you to achieve a guaranteed 99.99% uptime. A2Hosting’s “Design Your Perfect Cloud” option gives you great flexibility in terms of budget and enhanced scalability to deal with your fluctuating resource requirements.
A2Hosting Cloud VPS Hosting Key Features:
SwiftServer Platform, featuring ultra-speed SSD (Solid State Drive), can speed up page load time by over 300%.
Media Temple offers premium cloud solution at a competitive price. Media Temple’s most popular cloud hosting product, the Grid, is one of the web’s first public cloud hosting platforms. The Grid is built around shared clusters of high quality server hardware, featuring redundant networking technology and CloudFlare content delivery network. The entry level Grid package, which comes with 64-bit CentOS, 1 GB RAM, 30 GB Disk Space, 1 TB Monthly Bandwidth and auto-scaling feature to adjust to your resource requirement, will cost you $20 per month. They also offer higher end cloud solutions to cope up with enterprise level large business requirements, priced in the range of $30 to $2500 per month.
Media Temple Cloud VPS Hosting Key Features:
Premium hardware with RAID-10 disks.
Software and hardware maintenance.
Guaranteed 99.999% uptime.
24/7/365 by online chat, Twitter, and phone.
Network and server monitoring with Parallels Power Panel.
Advanced security with CloudFlare CDN and Cloudmark spam-detection technology.
A virtualized cloud environment not only grants you a guaranteed amount of resources but also allows for easy expansion and contraction of hardware capacity as your demands change. Since cloud hosting platforms are highly specialized environments with a variety of distributed features, it’s important to find a host that can serve your specific requirements in an efficient manner. In our bid to list down the best cloud hosting service providers, we took in to account all the generic features that are most vital in finalizing a cloud hosting partner for your website.
