Top 5 Companies That Offer Cloud Hosting

The cloud hosting technology has reached the point where it is ready for real world use in data centers, and a lot of them are already making the switch and allocating more and more servers for this purpose.

And they’re really doing the right thing, because cloud hosting will allow customers to have any processing power they need, and pay only for what they use, which is much cheaper than dedicated servers or clusters. If the client’s site is loaded one day and idle the other, he will pay more for the first day and less for the other. And probably the best thing is that the website will never be inaccessible or slow, because it’s got the power of hundreds and thousands of physical machines behind it, allocating as many resources as it needs.

If you are thinking of switching to cloud hosting or are only looking for the best first host (for which cloud hosting is just as good, if not better, than even shared), here is a list of some of the best cloud hosting providers.

Amazon. This company’s cloud hosting services (the EC2 computing and S3 storage) are very popular among developers and businesses that need a lot of flexibility and reliability. They’ve been among the first to start offering cloud hosting, and they’ve had enough time to perfect the technology and introduce new, advanced features. The bad thing about Amazon’s services is that there are quite hard to setup for anyone that is not an IT specialist (Amazon themselves say that it’s for professionals and businesses), so if you are just starting out and want to try cloud hosting, you’d be better off trying another provider.

Slicehost. This is one of the first companies that started up offering exclusively cloud hosting services, and a lot of webmasters and developers swear they’re the best. They certainly do have the time advantage, but their prices are quite a bit higher than other offers. At least they offer excellent support and uptime guarantee with their packages. Rackspace has recently bought the company, which will still continue to work under it’s own name, but thanks to the data centers owned by Rackspace, we hope they’ll bring the prices down and increase the amount of resources.

Cari.net. This is one of the best providers of dedicated servers in the hosting industry, and while they’ve started offering cloud hosting servies only recently, it quickly became a success and their number one seller. That’s probably because businesses are indeed better off on a cloud server than a cluster of dedicated servers, plus Cari.net has a lot of nice features and innovations that make its offers unique and customizable for each client.

1and1. This company has a long history and has been offering great dedicated servers in their own data centers around the world since the beginning of commercial Internet. They’ve had their fair share of problems, mainly with their shared hosting packages, but as of late, they’ve dealt with them and their 4 million+ clients are quite happy. They’ve recently built another data center in the US, and started offering the Dynamic Cloud Server at the lowest prices possible, which continues their tradition of offering high-performance, low-price servers. The only drawback would be their customer support, which is notably slow, but they do at least keep the hardware in working order, so you’ll only have to deal with software problems yourself.

Rackspace. This provider is also well known in the hosting industry, and their dedicated, VPS and shared hosting packages have received a lot of good user reviews and awards. They’ve recently got into cloud hosting and started offering their own services. What sets them apart from other companies is the fact that they acquire a lot of great cloud hosting startups with their unique technologies and implement them in all of their offers, which makes them great for people who need a lot of extra features. Rackspace also offer their own separate file storage, remote backup and computing services.

GoGrid. This company is relatively unknown among users of traditional hosting, but that’s because they specialize in clusters, dedicated and cloud servers, plus offer a unique technology that allows the clients to interconnect them and use all 3 technologies at once, which can be very useful in a number of situations.

Softlayer. Another company that also specializes in the so-called “hybrid hosting”, which like GoGrid, means their clients can use any of the available hosting technologies (dedicated, cloud and clusters) interconnected together. Their offers are also cheap (a bit lower than the other companies), and their API is very advanced and tested by time, plus they’ve got very good customer support – just what a professional webmaster, developer or startup needs.

If you need a dedicated server or VPS for any application or just want to switch from your current hosting solution, there’s no reason not to choose cloud hosting. It has better performance, reliability and stability and is much cheaper in the long run – a seemingly excellent choice.

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