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Reviewed
With so many cloud hosting platforms available these days, choosing the right one can feel overwhelming. When narrowing down the field, users should look at features such as scalability, a fast-loading solid-state drive (SSD), free secure sockets layer (SSL) and uptime guarantees. To help you make the right choice for your needs and budget, Forbes Advisor looked at the best cloud hosting services on the market and compared them based on pricing, features and usability.
Featured Partners
1
Bluehost
$2.95 per month
Unmetered bandwidth, SSD storage starts at 10GB
Free domain name & SSL for a year
2
HostGator
$2.75 per month (for first 36 months)
30 days
Free SSL certificate, free website transfer
3
Web.com
$2.75 per month
Yes
Customizable templates, Easy drag-and-drop technology, SSL certificate
The Forbes Advisor Small Business team is committed to bringing you unbiased rankings and information with full editorial independence. We use product data, strategic methodologies and expert insights to inform all of our content and guide you in making the best decisions for your business journey.
We reviewed hosting services using a detailed scoring process to help you find the 11 best cloud hosting services for small businesses. Our ratings looked at factors such as pricing, hosting features, customer reviews and an analysis by our experts. All ratings are determined solely by our editorial team.
Traditional web hosting places all your website resources on a single server. That server may be fully dedicated to your site’s assets (dedicated hosting services), or host several websites simultaneously (shared hosting services). The problem with shared and dedicated hosting is that if the server goes down or encounters a hack, your website will be negatively impacted and could go down altogether.
Cloud hosting uses a network of servers to host your website and data. Should one server experience a failure of any kind, another server steps in to assure your website is secure and available to all those who want to access it.
In the cloud, a pool of servers share resources, including CPU, RAM and storage, which exponentially increases the flexibility and scalability you can achieve. Redundancy is built into cloud hosting, which means the chances of your website going down—or performing below acceptable performance standards because of a hardware issue—diminish considerably.
Some cloud hosting providers even offer a 99.999% or greater uptime guarantee, which translates to less than six minutes of downtime per year.
Choosing cloud hosting over dedicated or shared hosting services has several benefits. Here are the 10 top benefits of cloud hosting:
1. Increased security: Your files are available on several servers and not stored in a single vulnerable location.
2. Scalability: Since you are no longer confined to one server, there is no limit to how you can scale and expand your website or websites.
3. Reliability: Most cloud hosting providers guarantee exceptional uptime—often 99.999%.
4. Flexibility: Choose the resource capacity and features you need rather than being stuck with pricey capabilities you don’t need.
5. Speed: Cloud server providers are known for delivering superfast site loading speeds.
6. Affordability: There are cloud hosting plans on the market for just about any budget.
7. Easy website setup: Cloud hosting deployment is relatively straightforward, and most providers offer site migration assistance.
8. Better user experience: A fast-loading website makes for a great experience for your site visitors.
9. Redundant servers: Should one cloud server fail, another server ensures your site remains accessible.
10. Disaster recovery: In the event of data loss due to unavoidable circumstances—such as natural disasters or a destructive security breach—top-notch cloud hosts provide exemplary recovery processes.
Cloud hosting costs more than shared hosting, so it’s not a good fit for those on a shoestring budget. Also, cloud hosting is internet-dependent; thus, if the internet goes down, you will not have access to your data during the internet outage.
Cloud hosting does not protect you entirely from cyberattacks; however, since you’re not dependent on a single location for data storage, cloud hosting can help make those attacks less impactful.
The most significant disadvantage of cloud hosting is that you are completely dependent on your hosting service provider. This is why it’s so important to go with a reliable provider that has a solid reputation for quality, security and delivering on its promises.
The best cloud hosting provider for you is the one that meets your unique business requirements thoroughly. You must evaluate cloud hosting services based both on your current needs and your goals for the future.
Some cloud hosting features, such as free migration and domains, are nice-to-have bonuses, but aren’t always necessary. Other features, such as security and reliable uptime, are nonnegotiable when it comes to choosing a provider.
We suggest you take a close look at data storage, speed and performance, security, pricing and customer support when choosing a cloud hosting service.
Before committing to a hosting contract, users need to know how much storage is available and how easy or difficult it is to scale up or down as needed. These terms should be clearly outlined on the provider’s website and available to anyone vetting its services.
Some hosting providers such as HostGator, MochaHost and TMDHosting offer unlimited storage. Other hosting services provide 25GB to 50GB of storage on starter plans but offer expanded capacity in the range of 100GB to 16TB on top-tier plans.
If you suspect you might require storage capacity beyond what a provider has outlined in its standard plans, you can reach out directly to ask what it would cost to acquire more storage. Most companies offer additional storage for an add-on fee.
Several factors impact a site’s speed and overall performance. Poor website design is the main culprit that slows down sites, but other factors, such as inadequate CPU capacity, can negatively impact your website’s user experience.
With HostGator, you can choose from three plans that offer two to six CPU cores, which could be ideal for most small to midsized websites. Both InterServer’s and SiteGround’s top plans max out at 16 CPU cores, which makes these solution providers better for data-intensive websites.
RAM capacity can also have a big impact on site speed and performance. Generally speaking, more memory makes for a faster site. This is particularly important for sites that contain large files.
IONOS is a terrific example of a cloud hosting service that lets you scale memory according to your needs. The IONOS starter plan comes with a mere 512MB of RAM, while the IONOS top plan offers 48GB of RAM.
Whether your website is for casual blogging or big business plans, hosting security needs to be top-notch. To start, you’ll need an SSL certificate, but you also need to assess the hosting vendors’ reputation for compliance and cloud security features.
Specifically, look for how data is protected in transit and at rest, how user identity is authenticated, data encryption standards and cloud server firewalls. Select a provider that offers built-in tools and solid processes for combating phishing, viruses, spyware, worms, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and other security threats to your website.
Cloud hosting pricing should always be transparent and straightforward, with plans easily available for browsing and comparison. Users must decide which features they need, how much scalability they want and what type of contract will work best for them.
Every hosting provider will brag about its excellent customer support, but users must dig deeper during the research phase. If 24/7 service is advertised, does that mean live support? Chat? Video? Phone? The types being offered might make all the difference.
Featured Partners
1
Bluehost
$2.95 per month
Unmetered bandwidth, SSD storage starts at 10GB
Free domain name & SSL for a year
2
HostGator
$2.75 per month (for first 36 months)
30 days
Free SSL certificate, free website transfer
3
Web.com
$2.75 per month
Yes
Customizable templates, Easy drag-and-drop technology, SSL certificate
Cloud hosting providers typically offer a variety of server plans to accommodate various budget levels. Memory, CPU and storage capacity offered have the greatest influence over the price you’ll pay for cloud hosting; the more resources you need, the more you’ll pay.
Some vendors charge on a per-month basis, where you get the best price by committing to a multi-year plan. MochaHost’s plans start at just $1.95 per month with a three-year commitment. SiteGround’s plans start at $100 per month.
Other cloud hosting providers charge by the hour. Hostwinds starter plan is $0.006931 per hour. With the IONOS starter plan, you pay $0.0056 per hour with a max out-of-pocket fee of $4 per month.
Given the wide range of pricing options on the market, it pays to shop around. Also, when committing to a contract, expect renewal prices to be 25% to 50% more than introductory prices.
To choose the best cloud hosting options for this roundup, Forbes Advisor compared each service based on important factors such as overall value, ease of use, popularity and variety of features offered. We ranked each hosting service based on a five-star rating system, with the highest score being five stars.
Here’s what we looked at to compile each category’s rankings.
Cloud hosting services can be costly, no question. Our goal was to provide the top hosts that reflect a range of prices. Paying more means additional features which you may or may not need. We looked at each provider’s starting price, what it charged customers to renew once the initial contract ended, how many sites were covered under the plan, if it offered a money-back guarantee and how long that guarantee was for. This accounted for 10% of our weighted scoring.
A key feature we looked for in a cloud hosting service was an uptime guarantee. We have only listed services with excellent uptime rates, which is one of the main reasons to move to a cloud hosting provider. Another essential feature of most hosting providers is customer support. We looked at services and compared them based on their customer support options, including whether clients have access to live customer support and if it is available 24/7.
We also compared cloud hosting services based on additional functions, giving preference to ones that offer features that should be standard. These include a free SSL certificate, SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth and storage, cPanel availability, free business email address, website builder, content delivery network (CDN), automatic backups and more. We weighted features at 50% of our total score.
We wanted to know what actual users of these services thought of the providers, so we turned to third-party review websites, such as Trustpilot, to gauge actual responses by users. We looked for reviews that scored at least 3.5 out of 5 on these sites and positive reviews that numbered at least 300 for each provider. Those with fewer than that number scored lower in our ratings. These reviews accounted for 10% of the total score.
Continuing with customer reviews, our team of experts looked at several factors important to cloud hosting users, such as ease of use. We looked for cloud hosting services that are easy to use and navigate. We also compared providers based on setup difficulty, giving preference to platforms that require minimal time to launch and offer third-party integrations. Other factors considered by our experts included value for the money, stand-out features and the popularity of the service. This analysis made up 30% of the total score.
The best cloud hosting providers are HostGator, IONOS and DreamHost. Each service solution offers a strong value for the number and quality of critical hosting features provided and the level of service delivered.
There are three main types: IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) and SaaS (software as a service). IaaS provides a pay-as-you-go, on-demand infrastructure. PaaS allows organizations to rent the needed infrastructure, saving on costs. SaaS permits users to lease applications and host software on their own servers.
A backup organization copies cloud data and stores it in another system, allowing for quick access in recovery cases.
You should upgrade when it is imperative that your website or app runs reliably, no matter when or where it is being accessed. If you are looking for fast performance, scalability and better security, it’s probably time to make the switch. While many sites will start out with a traditional shared host, making the switch to cloud hosting allows users to truly scale their sites and take them to the next level.
With managed cloud hosting, your service provider helps you with important site management tasks such as site configuration, backups, server monitoring, security and website migration. Some providers offer fully managed cloud hosting services, while others offer partial management options.
Virtual private server (VPN) hosting is when your website data and resources are stored on a dedicated virtual space on a single physical server. If the server fails, your site cannot be accessed. With cloud hosting, your site resources are available on multiple servers in a cloud environment. If one server fails, another cloud server hosts your site and, thus, access is not interrupted.
Cloud hosting is highly secure. Strong encryption protocols, firewalls, restricted data access processes and secure cloud server warehouse facilities help keep data safe. Yet, as with all hosting solutions, cloud hosting is still subject to cyberattacks, though it’s typically better able to thwart those attacks than shared or dedicated hosting services.
Cloud hosting offers more control over your website in terms of performance and site configuration but that comes with a higher price tag than shared hosting. You’ll pay less for shared hosting but have less control over your website.
