This is a topic we have covered exhaustively from the point of major names in the industry: DigitalOcean, VPS.net, Linode, Rackspace etc. While we recommend checking those services out, in this article we are going to cover other cheap cloud hosting providers and why you might want to utilize them.
A quick note before we get started: most of the cheap cloud hosting solutions presented are missing some key elements other more expensive and yes, more established services, provide. But remember, this is cheap cloud hosting, keep your expectations at a high minimum.
Photon VPS
Catchy marketing name? Check. Low price point for basic cloud hosting solutions? Check.
With Photo VPS, your cloud hosting needs can be met for as little as $4.97 per month. For that whopping amount of monthly spend, Photo VPS will power your cloud hosting needs with 25 GB of disk space, 500 GB monthly bandwidth, dedicated CPU, dedicated RAM, 2 Gbps DDoS mitigation and a dedicated IP. Your operating system is Linux. What’s missing? No unlimited domains. No Shell Access. No Secure FTP. No cPanel or Plesk.
Why You Might Host with Photon VPS: Under $5 for 25 GB Disk Space, 500 GB Monthly Bandwidth and 2 Gbps DDoS mitigation? You know it. In addition, Photon VPS has moved their services from SAN storage to SSD Cloud Storage. In an effort to keep up with the big boys of the industry, for under $5, SSD Cloud Storage hosting is a pretty good deal.
Extra Perk: If you are looking for cheap enterprise cloud hosting, Photon VPS provides it for under $10 per month. Check out Photon VPS hosting plans.
Ubiquity Cloud
With a name meant to target the entire cloud hosting market, Ubiquity Cloud aims to bring their hosting services to everyone – on the cheap.
Whereas Photon VPS provides a few limited cloud hosting services, Ubiquity Cloud offers multiple solutions with a pay-as-you go model of per hour billing.
For a round number of $5 per month, Ubiquity Cloud will power your web server with 512 MB memory, 1 CPU, 15 GB SSD disk and 1 TB of bandwidth. If you are too cheap to pay the $5 per month or are simply looking to pay for your cloud server in increments of cents, Ubiquity Cloud provides customers $0.07/hour for the package described above.
Why You Might Host with Ubiquity Cloud: The company offers deployments in Atlanta, New York City, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Atlanta. The company describes their cloud infrastructure as “mission critical” and will provide you with technical customer service along with a 100% uptime SLA. For as low $5, not a bad deal.
Extra Perk: Every SSD cloud server comes stacked with RAID-10 arrays. Get ubiquitous with Ubiquity Cloud here.
Google App Engine
The Google App Engine, also known as the Google Cloud, provides excellent and nearly free cloud hosting for websites which are considered static. What this means? If you operate a website which conforms to the following specifications, you can host your website in the cloud for free.
If your website uses 1 GB of outgoing network traffic (bandwidth), 1 GB of incoming network traffic (bandwidth), 5 GB of cloud storage and 28 instance hours per month, the Google App Engine will charge you nothing for host your website per month. Check out the Quotecolo “Guide to Google Cloud Hosting” guide for more specs.
Moreover, if you need more cloud hosting power, Google, like Amazon and Ubiquity Cloud will charge you by the hour (pay-per-use) for your cloud needs. This means you could pay nothing to mere cents per month for a well composed static website.
Why You Might Host with Google App Engine: Google data centers. Google hardware. Low to no costs per month. It’s Google. Enough said.
Extra Perk: If you are a developer, hosting your app using the Google App Engine is ideal.
Wable
How does $0.75 per month sound for cloud hosting? Sound too good to be true? With Wable, it isn’t. The company utilizes OpenVZ as their virtualization tech, SSD Raid storage arrays and deployment locations in Dallas, New York City and Seattle.
For a grand total of $6 per month, Wable will furnish you with a cloud server stacked with 1 – 2 VPS servers, 2 CPUs, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB SSD disk, 3,000 GB bandwidth, 2-20gbps port speed and 4 IPv4. For $6 per year, or $0.50 cents per month, Wable cloud hosting can be all yours.
Is there technical support? No. Control panels? No. Choice of multiple operating systems? No. Redundant data fail over? Not a chance. Support for third party applications? Nope.
For $6 per month, Wable offers bare bones cloud hosting. They provide the infrastructure and you provide everything else.
Why You Might Host with Wable: If you are a developer who knows how to run your own cloud server, you can’t beat $6 per month or $0.75 per month. (pay-as-you-go) If you are up the challenge of fully maintaining your server, Wable might be your best friend.
Extra Perk: None needed. $0.75 per month. Click here for all Wable cloud hosting plans.
VexxHost
Taking a page from the DigitalOcean playbook, VexxHost advertises their services as deployable in 30 seconds. As you might know, DigitalOcean advertises their deployment rate of 55 seconds. With a similar price point $5 per month, Vexxhost is actively going after DigitalOcean.
For $5 per month Vexxhost provides consumers with 2 vCPUs, 512MB memory, 20GB disk and 2 TB bandwidth.
Do they offer RAID 10 disk arrays? Yes. Do they offer 1.4 gigabytes per second read and 900 megabytes per second writes to disk rates? Yes. Do they offer fully redundant cloud severs? Yes. Do they provide 24/7/365 cloud technical support? Yes. Full with multiple operating systems – Linux and Windows – along what the company deems “unique cloud server control panels”, for $5 per month, VexxHost offers a lot of cloud hosting.
Why You Might Host with VexxHost: If $5 isn’t low enough, VexxHost is constantly offering promotional codes on their services. Take this one for example, live as of 12/8/2014: “Limited Time Special offers: Offer Available for Next 134 Sign Ups. Get 50% Lifetime Discount on Your Cloud Server. Fifty percent off for life would mean your price would drop to $2.50 per month for the package described above. Great deal.
Extra Perk: If you are looking for higher tiered cloud hosting solutions, VexxHost packages run the line topping out at 16 vCPUs, 64GB memory, 250GB disk storage and 20TB transfer. This package will cost $640 per month. For VexxHost, this package is what they consider enterprise. Click here for all VexxHost cloud hosting plans.
The services described above are five cheap cloud hosting solutions. Are they the best web hosting services in the world? No. Are they going to be your end-all be-all cloud solutions which will power your small company website as it transitions into a large scale enterprise site? Most likely not. But will they get the job done? Yes.
As cheap cloud hosting companies go, VexxHost, Wable, Google App Engine, Ubiquity Cloud and Photon VPS will get you to where you want to go.
This said, if you are looking for more established big name players who also carry a low price point, we recommend checking out DigitalOcean or the gold standard, Amazon Web Services (AWS).