Many traditional web hosting types exist for building your website, including shared, dedicated, WordPress, and virtual private servers (VPS). However, another hosting option distributes your site across multiple servers and provides a flexible way to power your website: cloud hosting. If you want to leverage cloud hosting as your site’s foundation, we’ve gathered everything you need to know to complete the job. Read on for the best cloud web hosting services we’ve tested, including Editors’ Choice winner Ionos, followed by what to consider when choosing the right service for your needs.
Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
EDITORS’ NOTE
November 13, 2025: With this update, we have removed HostGator and Hosting.com from our list because they no longer offer cloud hosting. The rest of our picks have been vetted for currency and availability.
- Great budget-friendly shared hosting options
- Excellent dedicated hosting plans
- Offers a choice of Linux or Windows servers
- Helpful customer service
- Limited email accounts with some plans
AccuWeb Hosting (starting at $10.99 per month for 10GB of storage, 500GB of monthly data transfers, and unlimited domains) offers a diverse range of cloud server options, including Linux and Windows OS plans. The web host has extensive global server locations spread across four continents, letting you host a website in the data center of your choice.
Companies with an international scope. Ideally, you want a server center near your visitors to shorten the time it takes for data to reach your audience. AccuWeb excels at this, allowing you to select a data center from numerous worldwide locations, including Chennai, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, and New York.
Maximum Storage – Cloud
25GB
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AccuWeb Hosting Review
- Excellent cloud hosting packages
- Linux- or Windows-based servers
- Easy-to-use website creation tools
- Many hosting plans for various budgets and needs
- Lacks reseller hosting plans
- Sparse email options
Ionos is a top choice for enterprise-oriented cloud-server needs. It offers excellent, highly customizable packages, Linux and Windows OS options, and data centers in both the USA and EU. Plus, its pro-rated pricing is very competitive for the features included with each plan (starting at $5.76 per month for 2GB of RAM, 60GB of SSD storage, and unlimited monthly transfers).
Ionos’ flexible, high-end plans and on-demand resource scaling make it a superb choice for big businesses that require additional server capacity for handling large amounts of data crunching or high traffic volumes.
Maximum Storage – Cloud
500GB
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Ionos Web Hosting Review
- Excellent cloud hosting offerings
- Extensive domain-management tools
- Unlimited data transfers per month with many plans
- Generous shared hosting money-back guarantee
- You must pay for email with the Shared Starter plan
- No telephone support
- Not all plans have Windows-based servers
DreamHost’s cloud server options are highly customizable, offering multiple server operating systems. This gives DreamHost a unique advantage over many web hosting competitors, which generally focus on Linux. Likewise, these plans scale well as your site requires more resources, making DreamHost an excellent hosting option. The affordable cloud packages start at $4.50 per month for 512MB of RAM, 80GB of storage, and unlimited monthly data transfers.
Individuals or businesses that need more than a standard Linux operating system (though, the web host offers that platform, too). DreamHost’s many OS options are worth exploring if you’re running a small to medium-size venture that requires a BSD or Windows server architecture.
Maximum Storage – Cloud
100GB
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DreamHost Web Hosting Review
- Robust cloud, dedicated, reseller, and VPS packages
- Prorated VPS plans
- Powerful, high-end server specs
- Excellent uptime
- Terrific customer service
- Expensive
- Lacks shared hosting plans
Liquid Web’s cloud hosting plans are available in multiple, managed tiers, offering Linux or Windows OS options. The higher-end plans are on the pricier side of the hosting spectrum: you’ll pay $308 per month for 32GB of RAM, 960GB SSD storage, and 8TB of monthly data transfers. Still, they combine the power and resources of dedicated servers with the immediate flexibility and provisioning of a cloud platform.
Small, medium, or large businesses that lack the resources or expertise to manage back-end website operations. With Liquid Web, your managed cloud servers receive the white-glove treatment to keep your website running smoothly.
Maximum Storage – Cloud
917GB
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Liquid Web Hosting Review
- Terrific uptime
- Excellent reseller and VPS hosting plans
- Good customer service
- Minecraft server hosting
- Not every plan has a Windows server option
- Short money-back guarantee window
You get robust package options with Hostwinds. The company offers several pro-rated cloud server packages, ranging from a blogger-friendly entry-level tier (starting at $4.99 per month) to a high-end powerhouse plan (starting at $328.99 per month) with 96GB of RAM that can handle nearly anything you throw at it. In addition, Hostwinds lets you outfit a server with either the Linux or Windows operating system.
Webmasters who require large server RAM allocations to power their sites. If you plan to build e-commerce-focused or content-heavy pages, you need dynamic pages and sufficient RAM to handle the load. On that front, Hostwinds delivers with servers that max out at 96GB of RAM. High RAM totals enable your purchased cloud servers to run large processes or a substantial number of smaller processes simultaneously.
Maximum Storage – Cloud
50GB
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Hostwinds Web Hosting Review
- Unlimited data transfers with the cloud, shared, and WordPress plans
- AI tools
- Gaming servers
- Includes the Hostinger Website Builder
- Helpful customer service
- Lacks dedicated web hosting
- Not every plan has a Windows option
- No phone support
All Hostinger cloud plans (starting at $27.99 per month for 3GB of RAM and 100GB of NVMe storage) come with a bevy of useful features, including a free domain name, dedicated IP address, and SSL certificate. The only real limiting factor is Hostinger’s lack of Windows OS servers; you’ll only find Linux hosting here.
Hostinger’s an attractive option for newcomers building their first websites, since the company’s plans are a one-stop shop that includes many useful features. These include unlimited site hosting, unlimited monthly data transfers, and several managed WordPress tools.
Maximum Storage – Cloud
300GB
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Hostinger Web Hosting Review
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The Best Cloud Hosting Services for 2025
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Buying Guide: The Best Cloud Hosting Services for 2025
What Is Cloud Hosting?
Traditional hosting lets your website leverage the resources of a single server, including its CPU, RAM, storage, and data transfers. With shared hosting, for example, your website shares resources with other sites hosted on the same server. The result is many annoying power limitations and the inability to handle sharp traffic surges. For better service, you can opt for a virtual private server or a dedicated server of varying power levels. In all these cases, you’re relying on one server, and that’s it. However, cloud hosting kicks that single-server hosting model to the curb. With cloud hosting, your website draws resources from multiple servers.
Cloud hosting’s use of multiple servers gives it advantages over traditional hosting. For example, if your website experiences a sudden traffic spike, it can pull resources from another server to prevent slow page loads or, worse, the site going down. Additionally, cloud hosting enables your website to scale resources up or down as needed with ease. With traditional hosting, you may need to switch to a different hosting type (such as from shared to VPS or dedicated) to meet your site’s power requirements.
Please note that there are various types of cloud hosting services. Traditional web hosts, such as DreamHost and Hostinger, offer cloud hosting packages priced similarly to their other web hosting packages (typically in the shared or VPS categories). In this roundup, we’re primarily focused on these small business-friendly cloud hosting solutions.
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud hosting is also available from providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Rackspace. Although these are technically cloud hosting services, they are not what’s highlighted here.
5 Things You Need to Know About Web Hosting
Which Cloud Hosting Service Is Best?
It depends on what your website requires. Need lots of bandwidth? Many cloud web hosts offer unlimited monthly data transfers. That said, if you’re interested in “unlimited” anything, be sure to read the tiny print to ensure there aren’t any surprises. In other words, ensure that your definition of “unlimited” matches the hosting service’s definition. They can be two very different things.
Speaking of storage, we’ve found that cloud hosts typically offer hard drives or solid-state drives in various capacities. However, you may occasionally find a web host offering unlimited storage. (Again, the usual caveats apply regarding “unlimited” anything.) Solid-state drives are typically faster than their hard-drive-based counterparts, but they have smaller storage capacities. A traditional hard drive is the best option if you’re looking for sheer volume.
Regarding server operating systems, Linux is typically the default option. Still, some services also offer Windows hosting. If you have specific server-side applications that require Windows, such as SQL Server or a custom application written in .NET, then you need to ensure your web host offers Windows hosting. Our Linux vs. Windows Server explainer has everything you need to know about these operating systems.
Recommended by Our Editors
You’ll also want a web host with responsive 24/7 customer support. Forums, knowledge bases, and tutorials are useful tools, but there’s nothing like getting another human being on the horn (or at least in a web chat) when problems arise.
Security is also of the utmost importance. If you want to enter the e-commerce market by selling products or services, consider implementing Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS). Those technologies encrypt the data that travels between a customer’s computer and your company’s servers to safeguard the information from people with ill intentions.
Why Uptime Is Critical for Cloud Hosting
We dedicate an entire section to uptime guarantees in each of our reviews, as it’s of utmost importance. Simply put, if your site is down, clients or customers cannot find your business or access your products or services. They may find what they’re looking for elsewhere and never return. At the very least, customers will be annoyed, and it won’t help their image of your business. Neither is a good outcome. All services suffer ups and downs, sometimes for reasons beyond their control. Those sites that fail to address the problem are penalized accordingly.
