Over the past few years, we have been steadily migrating from local systems to the cloud for data storage and processing. IT leaders and their line-of-business counterparts choose cloud providers as their local platform to enable ubiquitous access to shared pools of storage, networks, servers, and applications.

Cloud solutions do not require traditional IT costs, hardware, and software. The cloud model outsources all non-core business tasks, saving capital investment and support. Public cloud users can get the IT resources they need, and even the entire virtual data center, at a small price and pay only for what they use.

The world's use of technologies, such as virtualization, edge computing, and containerization, is growing. This trend increases the cloud costs accordingly. Research from Gartner shows that cloud users spent around $ 332.3 billion on cloud providers' plans in 2021. This is 23.1% more than $ 270 billion the year before. However, as the transition to on-demand accelerates, IT accelerates & SME CEO faces confusing supplier options.

Our team has compiled a list of some of the most popular cloud providers currently available to help you make the right decision. Check this detailed analysis of all the pros and cons and choose the best mobility source for you and your business.

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud offers a wide range of cloud-based products and technologies for businesses, accompanied by high-quality services. However, its web hosting plans are somewhat limited compared to its competitors.

1. Customer support

Alibaba Cloud offers live chat, a ticketing system, and toll-free assistance, as well as various types of self-service. In addition to a decent knowledge base created recently, a document center, blog, helpful FAQ sections, forums, and highly detailed step-by-step tutorials are all provided with photos.

2. Performance

Alibaba Cloud is developing a range of high-performance cloud products with large-scale computing, storage resources, and big data processing skills for users. These give a full suite of security compliance solutions in China, that could stimulate your company’s success.

Alibaba Cloud provides cloud auditing and monitoring tools for continuous and automated security inspections aimed to decrease compliance risks.

Their focus is the regulatory demands of the financial services sector to support highly regulated customers in Southeast Asian countries.

3. Pricing

Alibaba Cloud offers its customers a free trial of plans worth up to $ 1300, but this seems to be sufficient only if the registration period is less than a year. In addition, you can choose from over 20 products that are permanently free.

AWS cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud is a broader cloud computing platform, a portfolio of cloud computing solutions used individually or collectively. The AWS cloud is designed for IT managers and development teams. It provides containers, load balancing, VPC, and hybrid storage solutions in addition to Basic cloud computing services.

1. Features

AWS offers mobile, developer and management tools, IoT, security, and enterprise apps. You can get the highest control level using multiple administrative controls accessible through a secure web client. Tools available at AWS cloud include identification management, auditing, encryption/control/storage, monitoring, and logging.

2. Performance

The performance of AWS was almost the same as that of other cloud services during our tests. The tests used Geekbench 4 from Prime Labs, a cross-platform benchmarking app designed to treat all platforms equally regardless of the operating system. They ran the test on a VCPU running Microsoft Windows Server 2016 and 2 gigabytes (GB) of RAM. This benchmark has run many numbers, floating points, and memory tests. At this reference point, the higher the score, the better the result.

3. Pricing

In general, it’s a complex task to create a clear and convenient cloud services pricing. Usually there is a huge number of options, each of them at its own price, so first you have to decide what exactly you are looking for. Amazon has price calculators to help you, but they are also complicated.

Contabo Cloud

Contabo (former Giga-International) is a hosting provider from Germany. Advanced VPS (Virtual Private Server), VDS (Virtual Dedicated Server), and Dedicated Server Hosting are its main activity directions. This review will focus on its VPS services and analyze pricing, performance, security, and more.

1. Customer support

You can only reach the Contabo support team via phone and email from 8 am to 11 pm. Fortunately, Contabo has a comprehensive knowledge base with extensive articles on almost any topic related to cloud hosting.

2. Performance

It's fair to say that the provider has good reliability and speed performance, considering its affordable price. Sure, it's not the industry-leading performance, but it's still good overall.

3. Pricing

Joint, VDS, and dedicated plans are not too expensive. However, VPS is still cheaper. VPS hosting packages start at $ 6.99 / mo. Other options include shared hosting (3.99 / month), VDS ($ 49.99 / month), and dedicated servers ($ 139.99 / month).

Digital Ocean

Using this cloud provider isn't rocket science. You can easily manage your infrastructure due to the intuitive UX. The pricing is predictable and simple, offering you monthly and flat pricing options. There is also free 24-hour technical support at your disposal.

1. Simple Platform Calculation

Digital Ocean provides scalable solutions for builds and releases acceleration. You can pay for the flexible server configurations using pricing to performance or predictable pricing across regions and usage.

2. Storage

You can choose from multiple types of storage according to your needs. There are options available for any amount of data in the cloud.

3. Networking

Digital Ocean provides several means of your app's traffic control and protection, like:

• private network
• traffic filtering
• load balancing.

4. Database

You no longer need to build and run your database server. The combination of core VM platforms, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis databases will take the operational demands on for you.

5. Developer tools

Programmatically manage resources and integrate them throughout the developer ecosystem.

6. Pricing

Digital Ocean’s pricing is very affordable compared to other clouds. For example, you get 1GB RAM, 1 CPU, 25 GB SSD Disk, and 1000 GB Transfer for just 5$ per month ($0.007 per hour). The basic plan has a shared CPU. You can calculate the price according to the services you need using the pricing calculator.

7. Performance

DigitalOcean employs high-performance SSDs to offer an outstanding hosting atmosphere. Their basic plan of 1vCPU, 1GB memory did well with managing the traffic without slowing down. The consumer can extend the hosting capacities by adding RAM, CPU, or even storage. This way, companies can instantly scale without bothering about slowing down or malfunctions.

8. Customer Support

DigitalOcean gives customer support through its ticketing policy. That can be considered an advantage as tickets usually take time to acknowledge. If you want immediate customer support via mobile or chat, then DigitalOcean is not suitable for you.

However, they give sufficient documentation to find answers to most of your queries.

Hetzner Cloud

In 2018, Hetzner Cloud was the highest value VPS provider out there. We think this is still relevant today. Currently, several providers are close in price, but Hetzner still looks like the best choice for us.

1. Block storage

Though Hetzner has block storage, it does not provide object storage. Block storage can be mounted as a volume, while object storage is similar to Amazon S3.

2. Easy to use

Hetzner Cloud offers full-featured and customizable solutions for any budget, so choosing one of them won't take too long. You can select the appropriate package according to your requirements.

3. Speed ​​and experience

There’s not much information about speed on Hetzner's website, but the Data Center section promises "fast load times and best performance.”

4. Customer Support

You can reach the support team of Hetzner's Cloud via ticket/contact forms and phone. Provider's customers can also benefit from live chat. General inquiries are processed via email.

5. Pricing

The minimum contract period at Hetzner Cloud is replaced with an hour-based fee for those who use the provider's server for less than a month. The user can choose from multiple dedicated servers, custom solutions, VPS packages, shared hosting, collocations, and other services.

Linode

Linode aims to boost cloud innovation making virtual computing more available, straightforward and cost-efficient. Linode's solutions enable users to easily build, deploy, and scale applications in the cloud. Cloud provider's infrastructure platform with next-generation networks and advanced APIs works across 11 global markets from data centers worldwide. Customers can access a vast library of educational resources when the need arises.

1. Cloud for everyone

Linode's diverse solutions (e.g., intuitive cloud managers, full-featured APIs, flat pricing, etc.) enable everyone to scale their app in the cloud.

2. Global infrastructure

Thanks to its wide network across 11 Global markets and strong inter-machine communication, Linode Data Center reduces delays and scale friction.

3. Support system

The Linode support team is known for its velocity, responsiveness, and technical accuracy. You can seek their help via any communication channel you prefer: tickets, emails, phone calls, or social media.

4. Best price

Linode took the path of servers, hosting, and computing services optimization. Thus the cloud provider grants outstanding performance at an affordable price.

Scaleway

Meaningful cloud for customers is the core of the mission Scaleway chose for itself. With flexible, reliable, and cost-effective storage, computing power can operate on an achievable energy level. Scaleway's customers can benefit from:

• a dedicated server
• an advanced ecosystem with S3 compatibility
• up-to-date support for Kubernetes, Terraform, and presentations

The provider's resources make the below options real:

• virtual machine instances deployment
• network access rules definition
• application performance checks
• dick activity CPU or bandwidth usage control
• visitors monitoring

and many others.

1. Performance

Being one of the most considerable bare metal cloud servers on the market, Skaleway offers solutions for different workloads. They can handle the most super-intense workloads of mission-critical applications with the highest CPU power and memory.

2. Hosting

The provider's clients can benefit from web and cloud hosting with three hosting plans for each hosting type. You can choose the one that fits your company's website goals and objectives.

3. Pricing

The more resources are involved in high-performance solutions, the more expensive they are. However, Scaleway is known for its affordable price.

UpCloud

UpCloud is a European cloud service provider from Finland. Its platform servers work from 12 locations across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Australia, providing 100% uptime SLA..

1. Customer-centric approach

Every UpCloud customer can count on 24/7 in-house user support and custom onboarding. Business customers can benefit from a dedicated account manager's service.

2. Global data center

The cloud service provider operates 12 data centers worldwide, most of them powered by renewable energy.

3. Straightforward user onboarding

The user-friendly control panel and multiple tutorials are at your disposal to help you get started with UpCloud.

Vultr

Vultr is a very affordable and scalable hosting provider with fast and responsive support. It provides IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, so that you can set up DNS instantly. Backup services are available at a fair price. Click Automated Setup for several off-the-shelf control panel instructions. The server is forever up & the average uptime is 99.99%, that enables you to create any server within seconds.

1. Features

Deploy your server in a click-free, time-saving way through an inherent interface of your desktop or mobile. You can get an instant report of the overall status of your server using data such as bandwidth, CPU utilization, or current spending in a single click. Snapshot creation and expansion is also fast and easy.

2. Excellent speed

Speed is clear from the start, as the first activation process only needs a few seconds. In addition, the deployment method typically completes the revolution within 1 minute.

3. Dedicated IP address

Another outstanding feature is the changeable dedicated IP address. This makes it seem similar to a dedicated server, but the ultra-fast Intel Core makes it authentic.

4. Pricing

Vultr is using an Hourly Pricing model. You will be charged just for what you use. Thus, you don't have to pay for more than 672 hours a month because a month is equal to 28 days 24 hours each.

With eight pricing plan options, the platform is ready to meet all your requirements. The most popular plans allow 1 CPU, but users can use up to 24 CPUs.