Cloud Hosting Cost Comparison In 2025
We have analyzed different cloud hosting vendors and plans to provide a detailed guide on finding the best cloud hosting plan that offers the best value for your business.
A2 Hosting
Cloudways
SiteGround
Amazon AWS
Cloud web hosting services greatly benefit users and have effectively helped website owners manage resources, data, and applications. Not all cloud hosting providers have prices suitable for small or all the required features for scaling.
This article compares the prices of various cloud hosting services to help you determine which best suits you.
Let's get started.
Cloud Hosting Cost Comparison in 2022
Cloud hosting involves multiple cloud servers being shared by multiple websites. In other words, cloud hosting involves storing your site on multiple servers, which makes it possible for you to pull resources from various places.
Prices vary for different cloud hosting plans. Their special price depends on the vendor's charges for each available plan.
Here are some cloud web hosting providers and their price breakdowns to help you decide which cloud hosting provider is suitable for your needs.
1. A2 Hosting
Overall Best Cloud Hosting Service
A2 Hosting offers great server uptime to its users. It offers multiple tiers of cloud hosting for different website sizes and hosting needs, unlimited email accounts, and excellent customer support to help them scale issues and enhance productivity.
A2 Hosting is a cloud hosting provider that provides fast and secure cloud services for your application and data to help you effectively start and grow your online business or journey seamlessly and securely at an affordable price.
A2 Hosting Unmanaged VPS Pricing
- 1GB RAM
- 1 Core
- 20GB SSD Storage
- 0.5 TB Transfer
- 2GB RAM
- 2 Cores
- 75GB SSD Storage
- 2 TB Transfer
- 4GB RAM
- 4 Cores
- 150GB SSD Storage
- 3 TB Transfer
- 8GB RAM
- 2 Cores
- 200GB SSD Storage
- 4 TB Transfer
2. Cloudways
Best Cloud Hosting Service with Maximum Extended Server Scalability
Cloudways offers 24/7 customer phone support that exposes users to experts that provide relevant solutions to problems. With its advanced and premium support add-on plans, users can access Cloudways’ senior support engineers.
Cloudways is a top cloud hosting service provider that provides users with dedicated server resources. It comes with a Pay-As-You-Go-Pricing Plan, a cost-effective plan for users.
This cloud hosting service provides multiple dedicated cloud-based servers relevant to your business growth with little restrictions and increased freedom. Cloudways has more than 60 global data centers.
Cloudways Pricing
Digital Ocean plans
AWS plans
Google Cloud plans
3. SiteGround
Best Cloud Hosting Service For WooCommerce Websites and WordPress
SiteGround offers an uptime of 99.99%, which is great for your website hosting. It is perfect for running WordPress Sites and offers WordPress hosting on every plan.
SiteGround is a cloud web hosting solution with an auto-scalable cloud plan perfect for growing your business website and making it more attractive and functional.
With SiteGround, cloud hosting servers are fully managed as experienced developers are responsible for properly managing and configuring your cloud account.
SiteGround Pricing
- 12 CPU Cores
- 16GB RAM
- 120GB SSD
- 5TB Data Transfer
4. Amazon AWS
Cloud Host With Individually Purchasable Features
Amazon AWS offers various solutions to users, such as Amazon API gateway, CloudFront, Chime, App stream 2.0, Cognito, and Amazon CloudWatch, to ensure effectiveness in cloud hosting. Its machine learning capabilities can benefit technical data scientists and developers.
Amazon AWS provides website owners with multiple cloud hosting solutions to ensure that websites are at optimal speed and performance.
Amazon AWS Pricing
The pay-as-you-go mode of payment grants you complete access to the Amazon AWS solutions you require. With the AWS pricing calculator, you can determine the perfect cloud pricing estimation suitable for your server requirements.
Request a quote to get the Amazon AWS pricing suitable for your needs.
Amazon AWS offers three categories of free trials.
- Temporal free trial offers begin when you activate a particular service.
- The second offer is available for 12 months following your initial sign-up date to AWS.
- The third category does not expire and is available to all AWS customers.
5. Google Cloud Service
Best Hosting Solution For Minimal Traffic Websites
Google Cloud offers a suitable solution for simple websites, blogs, and other low to medium-traffic webpages on the internet. With Google Cloud Marketplace, you can manually create your infrastructure to improve your stack.
Google Cloud is one of the most popular cloud hosting services in most parts of the world. As its name implies, it is owned by Google. With Google Cloud, you have complete control and unlimited access to virtual machines and their configurable computing servers.
The vertex AI training feature and machine learning capabilities can help optimize your activities. Google Cloud offers data center migration.
Google Cloud Pricing
New customers are offered $300 in free credits to test, run, and deploy workloads. Existing customers are offered 20+ free products to use for a specific period.
Request a quote to get the Google Cloud Pricing suitable for your needs.
6. Microsoft Azure
Cheaper Cloud Service Provider Compared to Amazon Web Services
Microsoft Azure, popularly known as Azure, offers cloud computing services for efficient data and application management. The cloud hosting provider provides users with SQL or Windows server licenses.
Microsoft Azure Pricing
Microsoft Azure provides a pay-as-you-go pricing plan. You can request a pricing quote and pay in advance for up to three years to maximize your savings. Use the Microsoft Azure pricing calculator to determine your plan's actual price based on your needs.
7. HostGator
Cheap Cloud Web Hosting
Among various cloud hosting providers, HostGator offers affordable cheap cloud web hosting that is pocket friendly and supplies everything you require to manage your data and applications effectively.
HostGator Pricing
- 1 Website
- 2GB RAM
- 2 CPU Cores
- Unlimited Storage & Bandwidth
- Unlimited Websites
- 4GB RAM
- 4 CPU Cores
- Unlimited Storage & Bandwidth
- Free Positive SSL
- 6GB RAM
- 6 CPU Cores
- Dedicated IP
Read more Hostgator review
How Much Does Cloud Computing Cost?
Here are the important steps you must take to determine how much cloud computing costs.
Step 1: Audit Your Current Infrastructure Cost
You must examine and analyze the existing infrastructure to determine the cloud infrastructure cost. By analyzing the current infrastructure, you can easily identify specific areas where you can cut costs and save money.
Apart from cloud computing pricing, you will gain insight into how the future of the cloud environment will function.
While auditing your current infrastructure cost, you must be conscious of direct costs and indirect cloud server pricing.
Direct Infrastructure Costs
Direct infrastructure costs are relevant to cloud computing charges. This cost is caved out of the cost of cloud services associated with software and hardware, plus software license and maintenance contracts.
Furthermore, you can calculate the overall cloud server cost of ownership and analyze bandwidth, data storage requirements, and capacity of servers.
Indirect Infrastructure Costs
The indirect infrastructure cloud hosting costs are caved out of operational expenses. Examples of indirect infrastructure costs include the cloud computing costs of housing, the cloud server cost incurred to cool the physical server, and the indirect cost of staffing.
It is important to properly analyze these factors before you dive into a cloud service price comparison.
Step 2: Calculate the Cost of Ownership
Using the calculators provided by your hosting platform, you can seamlessly impute the number, types, storage capacity, and configurations of the servers you intend to buy.
Step 3: Consider Other Costs and Benefits
As you compare the cloud computing prices, it is important to consider both the cost and other costs of cloud computing and the relevant benefits you can derive from it. You will incur migration costs and cost on the amount of data available.
With a legacy system, you must be extra careful about the cloud server pricing because your legacy system is not cloud-ready and requires you to change the codes before moving the system to the cloud.
Apart from the cost incurred, there are various benefits associated with cloud migration. These benefits include:
- You can successfully enhance the overall business continuity
- You can increase flexibility and scalability
- Effective collaboration
- Seamless access to automatic updates.
- Access to free software
- Significant reduction of the negative impact created on the environment
After comparing the benefits and costs of cloud computing, you will realize that the benefits outweigh the expenses.
As you proceed because of these benefits, developing and testing new products before launching them into the market becomes easy and fast, and you will experience minimal downtime.
Cost of Server Comparison: On-Premises vs. Cloud Servers
While comparing the cost of a server, here are some important factors to consider.
- Infrastructure and Maintenance Costs: Vital investments are required to keep the servers functional when using on-premise servers. These investments are in IT and physical infrastructures, such as office space, electricity, insurance, and cooling equipment.
- IT Maintenance Costs: IT maintenance costs for on-premises servers could be in the form of memory, computing, storage upgrades, and hardware refreshes every few years.
- Network Traffic Costs: Network traffic costs are affordable on cloud servers but quite expensive when using on-premises servers.
- Energy Costs: Besides the energy equipment requirements, energy costs are significantly higher when using on-premises since most cloud service providers get bulk discounts for energy use.
- Labor costs: Labour cost is significantly high with on-premises which requires investment in personnel and training, but not so much for cloud servers.
Dedicated vs. Cloud Pricing: What is the Price of a Server?
Resources are perfect for your organization when deciding between a cloud or a dedicated server. Here are some factors to consider to help you effectively compare dedicated and cloud pricing cloud providers.
1. Server Set-Up Timeline
Cloud resources are always readily available, and their on-demand capabilities are part of the reasons they are largely south after.
If you are in a situation where you have to provision a server within minutes, using virtual resources will be perfect if you have an expert cloud staff readily available.
A leading data service vendor can offer convenient services to enable you to meet a fast turnaround. On the other hand, the case is different when using a dedicated server setup because the timeline required for the setup is usually longer.
2. Compliance Requirements
The choice between a dedicated server and shared cloud resources mostly depends on factors like the company's workload, data, or compliance.
The cost associated with non-compliance can be on the high side, but it is subject to the company's regulatory requirements.
3. Configuration, Management, and Support Needs
If your organization’s workload needs regular adjustment and fine-tuning to ensure continual scaling, cloud resources will offer better management and provisioning to your workloads. On the other hand, stable workloads are perfectly handled by dedicated servers.
These two factors are not absolutes, and it depends on the workload, responsiveness of your data vendors, and the expertise of your company’s information technology and cloud staff.
A highly responsive vendor is a great advantage to an organization with a dedicated server that relies on a vendor’s support to perform management and provisioning updates. The vendor will perform the updates quickly to ensure no delay.
It will be wise for your organization to outsource your data if it lacks competent cloud staff in-house to get superior performance, security, and cost optimization instead of utilizing cloud resources.
Using the wrong vendor has many disadvantages. Your organization will often have to wait for a long period before you can get the required updates to server configurations.
The solution is to carefully vet prospective data providers to ensure that you choose a highly responsive, dependable one that meets your needs and expectations.
4. Workload Input/Output Considerations
The best and cheapest option is a dedicated server for specific workloads associated with a relatively large database, like the high input/output (I/O) workloads.
When your company’s workload is frequently high-demand rather than occasionally high-demand, the cheaper option is dedicated servers instead of cloud resources.
5. Demand Consistency
In 2010 some computer science researchers proposed that most business workloads are candidates for virtualization or should be migrated to cloud shared cloud resources because they only utilize “fractions of a CPU or a few gigabytes of RAM.”
Virtualization environments enable these organizations to respond quickly and scale up resources when workloads peak. An organization with high demand should use a dedicated server rather than a cloud hosting server.
6. Anticipated Upgrades
The quality of service and its impact on customer satisfaction, business reputation, high availability, and other relevant factors are important to consider beyond the cost of the web hosting platform. Downtimes also harm business productivity and client churn.
A dedicated server can be easily configured and upgraded to meet your needs of high-demand workloads, such as high-traffic websites or high-volume video streaming.
These upgrades are rarely cheap. You can still maintain quality and control over your servers by performing relevant upgrades like added network cards, increased memory, or the addition of non-volatile memory disks.
7. CapEx vs. OpEx Pricing Needs
Cloud servers are billed based on monthly usage. This pricing structure is referred to as the OpEx model or operational expenditure.
On the other hand, dedicated servers have an upfront cost and a lower monthly cost for service and maintenance, which fits perfectly into the category of capital expenditures or CapEx category.
If your business is a start-up, the best model for you to consider is the OpEx model or operational expenditure, which helps you to minimize costs and preserve capital.
The CapEx model requires an initial investment, which prevents organizations from spreading their expenses over time to cut costs. Dedicated servers use depreciation write-offs.
8. Talent-Related Costs
Your organization must create a concrete provision, testing, migration, and ongoing maintenance plan.
To successfully execute this plan, you will have to rely on a third-party vendor to execute this plan successfully.
Reliance depends on the volume of virtualization or data talent your company has in-house. The strength of your existing talent and vendor relationships will influence your ability to optimize cost.
A major factor that can cause talent and time-related issues is the wrong vendor partnership independent of either path–cloud or dedicated servers.
Data and cloud talent are in short supply, and hiring expert staff could prove extremely difficult. Fully outsourcing your workload to a dedicated server with a reliable locale vendor and top-notch customer service record could ease internal talent woes during a tech talent shortage.
FAQ
Cloud servers are cheaper than dedicated services. Cheap cloud hosting plans begin at $5 per month, while a dedicated server plan generally starts at $50 per month.
Payment plans for cloud servers are flexible. You can pay for what you require at the moment or for a day and by the hour or month. With a dedicated server, you can only make the same monthly payment whether you use the resources or not.
Cloud servers are billed by the hour. This form of payment structure enables you to pay for the resources you require at the moment.
If a server is online for 12 hours and experiences major issues or damages, all the payment required is what you need and nothing more. Other cloud costs can also be included, such as managed services.
Cloud Server Pricing Comparison
With the multitude of cloud hosting options available in the cloud computing market, it can be tough to find the right platform that offers the best cloud servers for your web hosting needs at the right price.
The best cloud servers tend to come at an expensive cost, especially when you want a plan that can handle high-traffic needs conveniently. However, if your cloud hosting needs are not as huge, several tested options are available to address your cloud server needs.
Here are our top five cloud hosting providers to consider.
Best Overall
Cloudways
SiteGround
Amazon AWS
Google Cloud
Before choosing the best cloud hosting provider that offers the best value for money or within your budget limits, here are some resources to help you make a more informed decision.
- What is Web Hosting
- What is Cloud Hosting
- Web Hosting Types
- Cheap Web Hosting Services
- Fastest Web Hosting Services
- Cloud Computing Statistics