Top Five Alternatives to Amazon AWS Cloud

One of the many wonderful aspects to Amazon is there AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud offering. For anyone who has ever looked into opening a Cloud hosting account with AWS, you know that Amazon AWS offers consumers a wide range of hosting options, solid data center infrastructure, reasonable monthly prices (by hour is available) and a great support system backed up by some of the best IT professionals in the business.

SIDE NOTE: If you already use AWS or plan on getting AWS and need help architecting a solution or just lowering your monthly spend, please contact us for more details sales (at) quotecolo.com. We have helped hundreds of clients migrate to the cloud while setting up the correct infrastructure to help save both time and money along the way.

But what happens if being just another number in Amazon AWS Cloud services doesn’t appeal to you and you need Amazon AWS cloud alternatives? Where do you turn when you want more personalized Cloud Hosting with equally excellent hosting options at a reasonable monthly cost?

What happens is you turn to the five following stellar Cloud Hosting solutions.

1.        Kamatera

Compared to AWS or Azure, Kamatera is smaller cloud host but they offer a more user friendly and custom approach. Headquartered in Israel with office in New York City, they presently operate from 13 global data centers with thousands of servers worldwide while serving tens of thousands of clients. AWS clients can expect to save 30-40% when switching to Kamatera.

What Kamatera Cloud Hosting Offers:

• High Performance Servers – state of the art servers at the best speed and reliability.
• Wide Range of Products – cloud servers, cloud storage, private cloud servers, etc.
• Flexibility – cancel any product at anytime. Kamatera’s motto is “the most flexible cloud provider on the planet.”
• 24×7 Tech Support –  email, phone or support ticket options.

Kamatera prides itself on offering an enterprise cloud experience at an affordable price. Updated service options, 30 day free trail period and pricing can be found here (email us [email protected]).

2.     Cloudways

Cloudways is one of the most unique companies in the cloud hosting business today.  Along with their traditional products like WordPress and Ecommerce hosting, they offer a managed cloud platform for individuals, businesses and digital agencies. Instead of just looking at one host, clients now can look at several different “best of breed” cloud platforms – AWS, Linode, Google, Digital Ocean, Vultr or Google cloud in one place. Best of all, 24 x 7 customer support, managed services and a slew of additional options are included to keep your site and applications up and running.

What Cloudway Hosting Offers:

• Simplicity & Choice – Choice from 5 different IAAS Hosts, 60 nationwide data centers, PHP App support, unlimited Apps and unlimited control panel.
• Worry Free Experience – 24 x 7 Expert support, dedicated firewalls, managed backups/security, free migrations and CloudwaysBot.
• Scalable Performance – optimized Stack, advanced caching, PHP 7 ready servers and CDN services.

Cloudways’ most popular package costs $42/month which starts with 2 core processor, 4GB Ram, 80GB storage and 4TB bandwidth. They offer a 30 day free trial for new clients without even using a credit card.

3.     SoftLayer Cloud Hosting Services

For anyone who has ever been to a Cloud Computing Summit, a Cloud Hosting Summit, Interop, HostingCon or CloudExpo, you have run across the famous SoftLayer server challenge. The SoftLayer server challenge time’s contestants on how quickly they can rack, stack and connect multiple numbers of servers while onlookers and SoftLayer booth staff look on silently thinking, “I can beat this guy.”

The contest is well worn on the summit circle yet SoftLayer has proven to be anything but. With the somewhat recent purchase of SoftLayer by IBM in June of 2013, many in the industry speculated if the company would come out alive, if company offerings would change and if the price model for SoftLayer Cloud services would rise to meet corporate margin lines. Well, after nearly a year under the label of “an IBM company” SoftLayer has remained one of the best Cloud hosting companies on the market.

What SoftLayer Cloud Hosting Offers:

Much like Amazon AWS Cloud solutions and RackSpace Cloud hosting services, SoftLayer supplies consumers with a variety of web hosting solutions – one of which is Cloud based. The SoftLayer Cloud service, marketed as Virtual Servers, enables users to build their own server with their choice in RAM, CPU Cores and Disk Space. Two of the major benefits of SoftLayer is the ability for a consumer to choose hosting from a public or private node and between use of SAN storage or local storage.

The base virtual Cloud server with 1 CPU Core, 1GB of RAM, 25GB of Disk Space operating from a public node with SAN Storage will run $0.040 per hour or $27.60 per month. When that server is switched over to private node and local storage, the cost rises to $0.219 per hour and $151.60 per month.

For users looking for a larger resource configuration, SoftLayer offers virtual Cloud servers with a max resource configuration of 8 CPU Cores, 64GB of RAM and 100GB of Disk Storage. Operating from a public node/SAN Storage, this configuration will set you back $1.033 per hour or $703.89 per month. When switched over to the private node/local storage option, the configuration will set you back $0.996 per hour or $666.60 per month.

While the prices, power and flexibility are comparable to RackSpace, the one interesting downside of SoftLayer is users can only select 25GB or 100GB of Disk Storage. There is no between.

The truth behind SoftLayer is this: the firm built itself from a small hosting firm to a large scale web hosting company one under control of one of the largest tech oriented companies in the world. For the consumer looking for a rock solid service which isn’t going anywhere or will not experience any major fluctuations, SoftLayer is a smart choice.

4.     Media Temple High End Cloud Hosting

Some companies are marketing their AWS managed services as Cloud simply because the term is hot. Media Temple isn’t one of them. Choosing not to call their VPS (virtual private server) solutions Cloud on purpose, Media Temple has long held itself the haven of developers looking for a rock solid hosting environment who understands the importance of 99.99% uptime, Linux Command Line web hosting and instant scaling to meet growing developer infrastructure needs.

Much like Digital Ocean who has actively gone after the developer market, Media Temple has courted the developer market by enabling the installation of nearly 200 apps in a few seconds, the choice between Plesk/cPanel and pre-installing the latest versions of PHP, MySQL, Perl, Python, Ruby and more within every server.

Media Temple has also differentiated itself in terms of price.

What Media Temple Cloud Hosting Offers:

Media Temple VPS (Cloud) Hosting comes in six levels scaled on two tiers (business and developers). Business level one supplies consumers with 1GB of RAM, 30GB of Storage, 1TB of Bandwidth and your choice of control panels for $50 per month.

The most popular business plan, level two, supplies web developers with 2GB of RAM, 50GB of Storage, 1.5TB of Bandwidth and your choice of control panels for $100 per month. The most powerful VPS hosting package offered is level six clocking in at $1,500 per month for 32GB of RAM, 60GB of Storage and 3TB of bandwidth with control panel choice.

Switching over to developer VPS hosting, plans range from $30 per month (1GB RAM, 30GB Storage, 350GB Bandwidth) to $500 per month (16GB RAM, 500GB Storage, 3TB Bandwidth). If need be, the company allows developers to create a custom plan to supply the resources they need.

As mentioned, at more than twice the cost of the top SoftLayer VPS plan, Media Temple isn’t cheap yet they are rock solid. Annually voted and recognized as one of the most reliable web hosting companies in terms of uptime and support. But note, although Media Temple support is highly noted, it won’t come cheap.

Coming in two forms – CloudTech On-Demand and CloudTech Always-On, plans can run as high as $1,500 per month not included in monthly hosting fees.

Make no mistake about it, Media Temple is a great hosting company who has made their name marketing to developers and businesses. Media Temple is serious hosting for serious developers and businesses, who have a pretty coin in their pocket.

5.     Linode Cloud Hosting

Rounding out the top five is Linode. Long known for their dependable Linux hosting solutions, Linode, like VPS.net, has undergone a bit of a face lift in the past two years. With Digital Ocean coming on the scene, SSD servers took the industry by storm. As a result, everyone from Amazon, to RackSpace to Linode was forced to recalculate to include SSD offerings deployed in less than a minute.

After the facelift, Linode is now known for Linux web hosting with SSD servers with extremely quick deployment at relatively cheap per month expenditures. Understanding DO was posed to take over the market, Linode streamlined their solutions and reemerged as a simple hosting platform for serious web hosting professionals.

What Linode Cloud Hosting Offers:

Right off the bat, all Linode servers are powered by SSD’s. Secondly, all Linode servers are billed by the hour and the month. Thirdly, all Linode servers can be deployed in less than a minute. Fourthly, the cheapest Linode SSD Cloud server runs $10 per month and the most expensive runs $960 per month.

There are nine levels of Linode SSD hosting. The first level provides consumers with 1GB of RAM, 1 CPU Core, 24GB SSD, 2TB of Bandwidth, 40Gbps Network in and 125Mbps Network out at a cost of $10 per month or $0.15 per hour.

The middle level plan, Linode 4GB provides consumers with 4GB of RAM, 4 CPU Core, 96GB SSD, 4TB of Bandwidth, 40Gbps Network in and 500Mbps Network out at a cost of $40 per month or $0.3 per hour.

The highest level plan, Linode 96GB provides consumers with 96GB of RAM, 20 CPU Core, 1920GB SSD, 20TB of Bandwidth, 40Gbps Network in and 10,00Mbps Network out at a cost of $960 per month or $1.44 per hour.

If you want more from Linode, you can get comprehensive data backups, node balancers, managed hosting and long view service monitoring. But in all honesty, the add-ons aren’t why you host with Linode.

The selling point for Linode isn’t the support, it isn’t how many Cloud hosting solutions they offer and it isn’t developer tools. No, the selling point of Linode, like DO, is affordable, reliable, scalable and dead simple to deploy web hosting. Linode and DO both operate with simplicity for consumers.

So, if you are looking for five great alternatives to Amazon AWS Cloud, Kamatera, Cloudways, SoftLayer, MediaTemple and Linode are all solid choices offering different levels of Cloud hosting solutions at a wide range of price points. All are good choices. If you have additional questions and would like a price quote for one of the above hosts, please contact us on the form above or just send us an email sales (at) quotecolo.com.