Top cloud hosting providers
Cloud hosting is a great choice for web projects which experience traffic spikes or are growing very fast. In comparison with traditional hosting, cloud hosting provides greater scalability, security and reliability. You can obtain additional cloud hosting resources in the matter of minutes if you need them. Since cloud hosting providers usually mirror your data to several data centers it guarantees availability of your site and higher security. There are also very affordable cloud hosting solutions which are suited for those on a shoestring budget. I picked up 3 biggest and best cloud hosting providers for this review.
Rackspace Cloud is the biggest and oldest player on the market of cloud hosting. Its Cloud Sites product works similar to traditional web hosting only built on horizontally scalable hardware infrastructure. A fixed monthly payment (starting from $10) gives you access to the service with an allocation of compute, storage and bandwidth resources. If your site exceeds these limits subsequent usage is billed on a utility computing basis. It allows an “unlimited” number of sites, databases and email accounts and includes reseller options such as client billing and support. Rackspace Cloud hosting also features custom built online control panel.
ElasticHosts is a London, UK based company, which provides an international cloud infrastructure service from two data centers near London UK and one in San Antonio TX. It uses Linux KVM virtualization to provide operating-system-agnostic cloud servers. It charges by resources (CPU, Memory, Disk and Network) as separate entities, allowing its customers to build virtual machines with widely different characteristics instead of simply categorized ones, such as small, medium and large instances. With ElasticHosts you can create servers and resize its capacity instantly, run any OS and software, control your resources using control panel or API.
GoGrid is a cloud infrastructure service, hosting Linux and Windows virtual machines managed by a multi-server control panel. Operated by ServePath and features an API. GoGrid cloud hosting allows you to build scalable cloud infrastructure in multiple data centers using dedicated and cloud servers, elastic F5 hardware load balancing, and cloud storage with total control through automation and self-service. GoGrid makes it easy to manage your cloud infrastructure with a variety of robust and easy-to-use tools, giving you the ability to monitor, administer, and scale your infrastructure components in real-time.
