The Best Cloud Hosting Providers - How To Recognize Them?

We need to acknowledge that there are no "The Best Cloud Hosting Providers" in the first place! Why? Because there is no industry standard or criteria about what makes a specific cloud service provider "the best" on the market. Therefore most articles that suggest who are the best are phony. This one is not because it is written to offer specific criteria, which will help businesses make a reasonable choice, not to point your attention to any particular service provider.

Business Model, Simplicity And Transparency

This is the most important factor that determines whether any company, especially smaller and medium businesses, should go with a certain Cloud service provider. The best choice any user can make is to go with a provider that has simplified its business model and made it easy for its clients to understand what kind of services they use. A company that deserves to be put into any "Best Cloud Hosting Provider" list must offer fewer Cloud infrastructure services and products instead of increasing their quantity for the sole purpose of charging its customers for each component they add to their account. Data Transfer and Bandwidth statistics, which are easy to understand, for example, must be included in the networking service and should not be offered and charged separately.

Pricing

Most major clouds offer "Free Tier" options. The only purpose of those so-called "Free" services is to encourage the client to sign up. The service models of all major clouds, however, are designed in a way that the client cannot use the full functionality of the offered "Free" tier. Most often, the clients are severely limited in the data transfer usage, which makes it impossible for them to use the "Free Tier" for testing. The "major clouds" usually require a credit card to be added to the account on sign up, which they use to charge those who signed up for the "Free Tier" at the end of the service period.

The pricing models of the major cloud service providers are usually so perplexed that it is virtually impossible for their clients to understand how the billing works and what they are paying for. Companies like AWS, for example, brag that they offer from a few dozens to a few hundreds of different services and that "you pay only for the individual services you need, for as long as you use them." However, AWS and other major clouds divide their services or digital products into increments. They design complicated pricing models, which allow them to charge anywhere between 50% to 200% more for most services they offer than the average market price.

Amazon, for example, offers nine different "Compute" services. When it comes to data transfer, Amazon offers its clients 11 products. If you look at the monthly service bill that AWS clients receive, it is virtually impossible to understand what kind of data transfer they use and what they pay for.

Any company that we'd list among "The Best Cloud Hosting Providers" must offer a fully transparent and easy-to-understand model of delivering and billing network, bandwidth, and data transfer services.

Cloud Platform

Most cloud providers do not explain what kind of virtualization platform they use and what makes it a "Cloud." At the same time, there aren't many genuine Cloud computing platforms on the market. To claim to be among the "Best," a cloud service provider should probably use VMware, CloudStack, OpenStack, OpenNebula, Microsoft Azure, etc.

Cloud Infrastructure

"Best Cloud Hosting Providers" must state what kind of Cloud service platform they use to sell services to their clients. Unfortunately, most Cloud providers use their terms and brand their services, making it virtually impossible for their clients to understand what kind of infrastructure and they use.

Support & Customer Service

It is unacceptable for clients to be charged for infrastructure support. They should have access to a customer relationship system that allows them to communicate with technical support and ask questions. Cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and many other Cloud service providers charge for access to support services, which is unacceptables. This means that they do not have a place in any "Best" providers list.

It is fair to charge customers for technical support of Os installation and client-side applications. This is explained in the next paragraph.

Managed Services

Managed Services is also called "Serverless computing," a phony term used by the industry to explain that "the provider allocates computing resources on-demand and managing them on behalf of the client." A good suggestion is to avoid companies that claim to offer "Serverless computing" instead of "Unmanaged" and "Managed Cloud Services."

3 Cloud Service Providers

HostColor

Host Color - Cloud Servers from only $20/mo

Public Cloud Servers and Private Cloud with High Availability and Fault-Tolerance for the computing and storage operations.

Go to our HostColor's Compare Cloud Service Providers web page to see how HC fares agains the major clouds and why HostColor is a much better choice as a Cloud service provider for Small or Medium-sized businesses than Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure.

HCE Europe Dedicated Servers

Europe Cloud Hosting Infrastructure

HCE offers VMware powered Cloud infrastructure. Take a look at our High Availability Cloud Servers.

If there is a failure on the underlying physical infrastructure or OS failure on your instance the Highly Availability (HA) service restarts your Public or Private Cloud Server and brings it back online within less than 1 minute. HA Cloud infrastructure is available in 20 different European countries.

RAX

RAX

RAX is a VMware VSPP and one of the most reliable Cloud Infrastructure service providers in Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

The company delivers Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud IaaS services with 100% availability from Equinix SOF 1 data center, based out of Sofia, Bulgaria. Our clients can choose compute services such as Increased availability and failover for the storage and computing operations.

3 most important things to know when you buy Web Hosting?

Failover & Cloud-based

Make sure that your web hosting provider has high availability or any form failover service in place. To have those it must use a Cloud computing infrastructure to deliver hosting services.

Managed Services

Nowadays Web Hosting is a commodity service. An outstanding web hosting provider has to offer Managed services and other valued-added services, such as SEO, CMS and website code optimization services.

Scalability

Any good web hosting company should offer scalability with its Shared Hosting plans. This means to use a Cloud infrastructure where the processing and storage operations are separated in different subsystems.