Choosing the right hosting platform can be one of the most challenging infrastructure decisions for startups. The right solution can accelerate growth, enhance security and streamline operations.
A leading cloud hosting provider, Rackspace offers scalable on-demand infrastructure and security tools for data protection. It’s also renowned for its Fanatical Support, which helps customers optimize performance and address compliance issues.
1. Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services offers a wide range of cloud computing services to businesses. It is a secure and reliable platform that provides maximum flexibility and cost savings. Customers use Amazon Web Services for many different purposes, including running web applications, processing large volumes of data, and creating and managing databases. Some well-known companies that use Amazon Web Services include NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Capital One.
The company’s services include Dedicated Hosts, which are physical servers that you rent for your own private use, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that gives you a secure and isolated network, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, and Amazon CloudFront that speeds up content delivery globally. Amazon Web Services also offers a number of developer tools and security features.
2. Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine (GCE) is a compute service from the cloud giant that offers self-managed virtual machines. It has a wide range of features including flexible computing and storage options, a robust network with high-performance fiber-optic connections to global data centers, and powerful tools for automation. It also offers support for multiple programming languages and integrates with other Google Cloud services.
The company’s pricing model is simple and transparent, with customers only paying for the compute time they use. Users can also take advantage of pre-payment schemes that offer a discount on availing Compute Engine services. In addition to that, GCE provides automatic recommendations to optimize the usage of resources. The service also allows you to create a custom machine type and choose your operating system, disk configurations, and network settings. Once the instance is set up, you can connect to it and manage it through a browser or with the gcloud tool.
Each instance created with GCE has a small boot persistent disk that contains the OS. Moreover, it has local SSD block storage that ensures low latency and high input/output operations per second. This feature is a significant differentiator for GCE from other competitors. In addition, the platform supports differential snapshots that only store data that has changed since the previous snapshot. This helps lower the cost of persistent disk storage.
GCE has a simple interface that lets you select the desired machine type, region, and zone. It also has a price estimator that displays the estimated hourly cost and monthly bill for different combinations of instance types and regions. The tool will also show the prices with and without sustained use discounts and the costs for paid premium operating systems.
3. DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is a popular cloud platform for developers, startups, and small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs). It focuses on simplicity, predictable pricing, and powerful features that help teams scale their apps. For example, it offers a suite of tools to automate deployments and streamline workflows, and its scalable foundation makes it an ideal choice for modern web and mobile applications.
Digital Ocean’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, called Droplets, provides fast and reliable virtual machines. With a provisioning time of about 55 seconds, its Linux-based VMs deliver high performance on SSDs. And the platform’s global footprint with 14 data centers provides a highly-available environment for your applications.
The platform supports a variety of popular Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS. It also includes 1-Click Apps that allow you to deploy pre-configured LAMP and WordPress installations. In addition, you can attach a self-hosted database or use DigitalOcean’s fully managed Database as a Service to store and retrieve your application’s data. DigitalOcean’s flexible pricing model lets you choose between on-demand and reserved instances. Reserved instances let you pre-pay for your droplet usage in exchange for a 1 or 3 year commitment and provide cost savings. You can also save money by using spot instances that reduce your droplet costs by allowing them to be reclaimed with only 30 seconds notice if you do not need them anymore.
The DigitalOcean dashboard offers real-time logging insights to monitor your Droplet performance and help troubleshoot issues. It also provides a number of tools to manage your resources, including Droplet resizing and auto-scaling. And if you require more advanced monitoring capabilities, you can integrate with third-party tools like SolarWinds Papertrail to gain visibility at the application level.
4. Akamai Connected Cloud
Akamai Connected Cloud offers a powerful infrastructure solution with a focus on an enhanced developer experience. Its low-latency and scalable performance enables organizations to build and deploy cloud-native applications. Additionally, it provides a more simplified process for managing infrastructure through an easy-to-use, intuitive interface.
The platform’s distributed architecture puts cloud computing services like compute power, storage, and databases closer to users, devices, industries, or IT centers, delivering single-digit millisecond response times. This approach also reduces energy consumption and lowers emission footprint compared to traditional models that require more distant servers.
Whether your organization needs cloud computing or enhanced security features, Akamai offers a range of solutions for you to choose from. Its bundled pricing model includes all these capabilities, even if you don’t need them, so you’re not paying for unnecessarily expensive capacity.
The company operates 365,000 servers across 135 countries and territories to ensure massive scale and redundancy for your most demanding content. Its infrastructure delivers the highest speeds for the most advanced web and mobile experiences and meets enterprise-grade performance guarantees.
However, the cost of this infrastructure comes at a premium. Its tier-based pricing structure has minimum commitments and monthly fees, with additional costs for overage and regional data transfer premiums. This can prove costly for organizations with irregular usage patterns, such as event streaming companies or seasonal businesses. Moreover, if you need to integrate additional services, such as WAF or DDoS protection, it’s best to select another CDN provider that offers an integrated suite of capabilities at an affordable rate. In contrast, CDNsun offers competitive pricing and a pay-as-you-go model with no minimum contracts or monthly fees.
5. Vultr
Vultr offers cloud infrastructure to global developers and businesses at industry-leading price-to-performance. Its scalable virtual machines (VM) and bare metal give you the freedom to deploy applications across six continents, paying only for what you use. Vultr’s cloud platform provides high-performance SSD storage and fast CPUs for speedy applications, while the company’s global data centers allow you to deploy your infrastructure close to your target audience, reducing latency and improving performance.
Vultr specializes in providing cloud-native hosting services for web hosting, ecommerce, telecommunications and other business applications. Users can choose from a variety of operating systems, storage options, RAM, and CPU to customize their servers. Vultr also offers block storage, object storage, and load balancers to help you store and protect your data and improve the performance of your applications.
Block storage allows you to add additional storage capacity to your virtual servers, while object storage is a highly scalable and cost-effective storage solution for large files. Vultr’s load balancers distribute incoming traffic across multiple cloud instances, increasing availability and performance. Vultr DDoS protection can be added to all instances, protecting against attacks that would otherwise increase the load on your servers and resulting in website downtime.
Vultr is a popular choice among SMEs and enterprises for its affordable cloud computing options. The service has 17 data centers globally and supports a wide range of platforms, including Windows Server, Linux, Apache, Nginx, and PHP. Its user-friendly interface makes it easy for users to manage their servers and scale resources. The company has recently updated its terms of service, requiring its customers to agree to license grants on all software, apps, data and other content hosted on its servers.
