# 1 Cloud Hosting

Company	Scala Hosting Total Reviews: 34 Average Rating: 9 / 10 Good Reviews: 33 Bad Reviews: 1 Official Responses: 0	Host Gator Total Reviews: 52 Average Rating: 5 / 10 Good Reviews: 30 Bad Reviews: 22 Official Responses: 0	InMotion Hosting Total Reviews: 48 Average Rating: 6 / 10 Good Reviews: 33 Bad Reviews: 15 Official Responses: 6	A2hosting Total Reviews: 140 Average Rating: 9 / 10 Good Reviews: 127 Bad Reviews: 13 Official Responses: 11	Fasthosts Total Reviews: 9 Average Rating: 1 / 10 Good Reviews: 0 Bad Reviews: 9 Official Responses: 0
Price	$ 9.95/mo. ($ 13.95 after first term) GO TO WEBSITE	$ 4.95/mo. VAT exc ($ 12.95 after first term) GO TO WEBSITE	$ 5.00/mo. GO TO WEBSITE	$ 5.00/mo. GO TO WEBSITE	£ 15.00/mo. VAT 20% exc GO TO WEBSITE
Plan name	Start plan	Hatchling Cloud	cVPS-1	Entry	15 / month
Product type	VPS Cloud	Cloud Linux	Cloud Linux/Windows	Cloud Linux	Cloud Cloud
Disk space	20 GB SSD	unlimited	25 GB SSD	20 GB SSD	40 GB SSD
Bandwidth	3 TB	unmetered	1 TB	2 TB	unmetered
CPU	1 CPU Core	2 Cores CPU	1 CPU	1 Core	1 CPU
RAM	2 GB	2 GB	1 GB	512 MB	1 GB
Dedicated IPs	1	0	1	0	0
Free domains	0	1	0	0	0
Hosted domains	unlimited	1	unlimited	unlimited	unlimited
Payments	Credit / Debit / Prepaid Cards, PayPal, Wire Transfer	Credit / Debit / Prepaid Cards, PayPal	Credit / Debit / Prepaid Cards, PayPal, Check Payments, Money Order	Credit / Debit / Prepaid Cards, PayPal, Skrill (Moneybookers)	Credit / Debit / Prepaid Cards, PayPal
Control panel	CPanel, [In-house], WHM	CPanel		CPanel, CentOS Web Panel	[In-house]
Features	Fully Managed			Wordpress, Fully Managed
Support options	Email, Help Desk, Forum, Live Chat, Available 24/7	Email, Help Desk, Phone / Toll-Free, Live Chat, Available 24/7	Email, Help Desk, Phone / Toll-Free, Live Chat, Available 24/7	Email, Help Desk, Phone / Toll-Free, Live Chat, Available 24/7	Email, Help Desk, Phone / Toll-Free, Live Chat, Available 24/7
Server Location
Promo		Special new coupons (from Feb 2013), maximum discounts on webhosting purchases ! 25% OFF, coupon code: webhostingtop25 $9.94 OFF, coupon code: webhostingtop9	Limited Time Only!Get the Power Plan for the introductory price of the Launch Plan.Plus a Free Domain, Free Website Migration, Free SSL, and more.That’s over $200 in Savings!	Use coupon code WHTOP for 51% off Shared Hosting plans!
Updated	Jun 2020	Mar 2020	Jul 2021	Mar 2020	Mar 2020
Read Reviews	#1Total Reviews: 34 Average Rating: 9 / 10 Good Reviews: 33 Bad Reviews: 1 Official Responses: 0 Scala Hosting reviews	#2Total Reviews: 52 Average Rating: 5 / 10 Good Reviews: 30 Bad Reviews: 22 Official Responses: 0 Host Gator reviews	#3Total Reviews: 48 Average Rating: 6 / 10 Good Reviews: 33 Bad Reviews: 15 Official Responses: 6 InMotion Hosting reviews	#4Total Reviews: 140 Average Rating: 9 / 10 Good Reviews: 127 Bad Reviews: 13 Official Responses: 11 A2hosting reviews	#5Total Reviews: 9 Average Rating: 1 / 10 Good Reviews: 0 Bad Reviews: 9 Official Responses: 0 Fasthosts reviews

Quick comparison of the top 100 plans in this category ordered by brand rating

About Cloud Hosting

In general, cloud hosting customers do not own the physical infrastructure, instead avoiding capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Many cloud webhosting offerings employ the utility computing model, which is analogous to how traditional utility services (such as electricity) are consumed, whereas others bill on a subscription basis. Sharing "perishable and intangible" computing power among multiple tenants can improve utilization rates, as servers are not unnecessarily left idle (which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development). A side-effect of this approach is that overall computer usage rises dramatically, as customers do not have to engineer for peak load limits. In addition, "increased high-speed bandwidth" makes it possible to receive the same response times from centralized infrastructure at other sites.

Architecture
Cloud computing sample architecture

Cloud architecture,the systems architecture of the software systems involved in the delivery of cloud computing, typically involves multiple cloud components communicating with each other over application programming interfaces, usually web services. This resembles the Unix philosophy of having multiple programs each doing one thing well and working together over universal interfaces. Complexity is controlled and the resulting systems are more manageable than their monolithic counterparts.

Economics
Cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they use. Consumption is usually billed on a utility (resources consumed, like electricity) or subscription (time-based, like a newspaper) basis with little or no upfront cost. Other benefits of this time sharing-style approach are low barriers to entry, shared infrastructure and costs, low management overhead, and immediate access to a broad range of applications. In general, users can terminate the contract at any time (thereby avoiding return on investment risk and uncertainty), and the services are often covered by service level agreements (SLAs) with financial penalties.

Although companies might be able to save on upfront capital expenditures, they might not save much and might actually pay more for operating expenses. In situations where the capital expense would be relatively small, or where the organization has more flexibility in their capital budget than their operating budget, the cloud model might not make great fiscal sense. Other factors impacting the scale of any potential cost savings include the efficiency of a company's data center as compared to the cloud vendor's, the company's existing operating costs, the level of adoption of cloud computing, and the type of functionality being hosted in the cloud.

Among the items that some cloud hosts charge for are instances (often with extra charges for high-memory or high-CPU instances); data transfer in and out; storage (measured by the GB-month); I/O requests; PUT requests and GET requests; IP addresses; and load balancing. In some cases, users can bid on instances, with pricing dependent on demand for available instances.

Key features

* Cost is claimed to be greatly reduced and capital expenditure is converted to operational expenditure. This ostensibly lowers barriers to entry, as infrastructure is typically provided by a third-party and does not need to be purchased for one-time or infrequent intensive computing tasks. Pricing on a utility computing basis is fine-grained with usage-based options and fewer IT skills are required for implementation (in-house).
* Device and location independence enable users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their location or what device they are using (e.g., PC, mobile). As infrastructure is off-site (typically provided by a third-party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect from anywhere.
* Multi-tenancy enables sharing of resources and costs across a large pool of users thus allowing for:
- Centralization of infrastructure in locations with lower costs (such as real estate, electricity, etc.)
- Peak-load capacity increases (users need not engineer for highest possible load-levels)
- Utilization and efficiency improvements for systems that are often only 10 - 20% utilized.
* Agility improves with users' ability to rapidly and inexpensively re-provision technological infrastructure resources.
* Metering cloud computing resources usage should be measurable and should be metered per client and application on daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. This will enable clients on choosing the vendor cloud on cost and reliability (QoS).
* Scalability via dynamic ("on-demand") provisioning of resources on a fine-grained, self-service basis near real-time, without users having to engineer for peak loads. Performance is monitored, and consistent and loosely coupled architectures are constructed using web services as the system interface. One of the most important new methods for overcoming performance bottlenecks for a large class of applications is data parallel programming on a distributed data grid.
* Reliability is improved if multiple redundant sites are used, which makes well designed cloud computing suitable for business continuity and disaster recovery. Nonetheless, many major cloud computing services have suffered outages, and IT and business managers can at times do little when they are affected.
* Maintenance cloud computing applications are easier to maintain, since they don't have to be installed on each user's computer. They are easier to support and to improve since the changes reach the clients instantly.
* Security could improve due to centralization of data, increased security-focused resources, etc., but concerns can persist about loss of control over certain sensitive data, and the lack of security for stored kernels. Security is often as good as or better than under traditional systems, in part because providers are able to devote resources to solving security issues that many customers cannot afford. Providers typically log accesses, but accessing the audit logs themselves can be difficult or impossible. Furthermore, the complexity of security is greatly increased when data is distributed over a wider area and / or number of devices.

Tags Cloud Hosting

Autonomic computing Grid computing Peer-to-peer CapEx SLAs load balancing VPN PaaS Intercloud

Cloud Hosting references