Cloud hosting is a great way to host your websites on the internet. With its flexibility, performance, and affordability, cloud hosting can be the best type of hosting you can go for. There are several cheap, well-performing cloud services available that you can easily opt for and build your first cloud server almost instantly. The one-click applications and scripts make it way easier than it used to be.
So, which cloud hosting service you should be using? Are there any criteria that might help you in choosing the perfect cloud hosting provider for your website?
The simple answer is NO. There is no specific set of criteria that will apply to everyone, except things like the affordability, stability, and performance of the servers in general compared to the other cloud services. It is mostly based on your requirements and preferences using which you should decide what cloud hosting provider to choose. There are a lot of providers that offer different types of hosting, when choosing your provider make sure they are the best at cloud hosting.
But there are some common things that almost any of the cloud hosting services you go for should have. This is what we are going to discuss in this article. We will list some of the most important things you should look for while choosing a good cloud hosting service. Here we go.
1. Stability
Stability is the most crucial factor while choosing a cloud server. Not only the cloud servers but for almost anything, stability is quite important. No one would like a website that goes down every once in a while randomly due to an unstable network or resources on the server. So, it should be the best thing a cloud hosting service should provide.
Luckily, most of the modern cloud hosting services are aware of this and built infrastructures that distribute the hosted applications across their huge cloud network. So, even if there are some problems in a certain area or network, your website will stay intact. Unless there are some extremely serious issues, the website will be always up.
Some of the most stable cloud hosting providers from our testing as services such as Digital Ocean, Google Cloud Platform, and Amazon Cloud Services. We almost never have seen them go down or the websites get slow. You can also trust them with your dream projects.
2. Performance
The second most important thing while choosing a cloud server is its performance. You don’t want your website to take several seconds to load. According to many studies, faster websites tend to perform better in converting users to paying customers as well as they also help to rank in search engines such as Google.
Website performance is a very important factor that you should keep an eye on. For that, the most basic foundation is the web server your website is residing on. You cannot make a website fast no matter how much you optimize it unless you have a solid server to host it.
Some of the well-performing servers in terms of speed are Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Cloud, and Linode. These services provide much better performance compared to many other competitors. They will be the perfect option if you want to make your website lightning-fast from the root itself. Even with no optimization, an average website will perform pretty quickly hosted on them.
3. Affordability
Do not buy more than you need. I get the fact that, as a growing website owner, you might need the webserver to be future-proof and avoid complications while upgrading the server resources. However, the fact that you will be wasting a lot of resources on something that is going to happen in the future doesn’t sound that good.
So, while choosing a cloud hosting provider, always compare them with the competitors taking their features into account. Several cloud hosting providers might have certain hidden limitations. So, be sure to read customer reviews to make sure of it. Affordable well-performing, stable servers are always the best.
You should also keep an eye on the renewal costs of these servers. Many cloud hosting services advertise their products with much lower rates the first time you purchase them. As soon as the term is over, the prices will be brought back to normal which may not be affordable for you. And you will be forced to migrate your website to another server. So, the initial costs may not necessarily be the actual cost of the server. The taxes (if applies) are also another thing to consider.
When it comes to the cheapness of the servers, the services such as Digital Ocean, Vultr, and StackPath would be the perfect solutions to go for. You can deploy your first cloud server for as low as $5 per month. Once optimized correctly, you can even host websites with thousands of visitors on them.
4. Support
The first thing you have to ask yourself is that if you are comfortable managing the cloud servers yourself or not. The cloud services that come with support usually costs much higher than those that don’t. Self-managed cloud servers are always affordable and preferred if you are used to managing the servers using the consoles.
There are several web hosting providers that have great support such as Siteground. But the problem with such services is that they cost several times compared to a self-managed cloud service. So, the choice is yours. If you are not used to managing your web server yourself, you may go with the managed-cloud hosting services. If you think you can do that, the perfect option will be doing it yourself using online resources (be careful though) and saving up some extra pennies.