Best Hosting Solution Providers

Hi Guys,

In this post we’ll talk one of the key aspects of web site performance i.e. website hosting solutions, and the best hosting solution providers in the market today that you can use for your website. Since a good hosting solution is vital to getting solid performance out of our website, whether you’re looking at page loading time, site availability, up-time, etc. All of these factors depend on a great extent on the hosting solution you’ve chosen for your website.

There are hundreds of thousands of hosting providers available on the internet, the vast majority of which you’ll find will meet your minimum requirements. The trick is choosing the right one. This selection process can be tedious if you don’t know what to look for.

So how do you decide what are the best hosting solution providers you can look at for your website? Typically you should look for 2 things:

• Whether the specifications the hosting solution offers meet your requirements and
• The price of the hosting solution

In my experience, the following website hosting providers are some of the best hosting solution providers in the market and probably good options to start with.

• Linode (VPS)
• Amazon EC2 (Cloud)
• Rackspace Cloud Servers (Cloud)
• Acquia Cloud

So let’s compare the options offered by the above best hosting solution providers to see what they offer. To start off, we’ll pick the lowest available hosting option offered by all four hosting providers and then compare their prices with each other, to see one offers the best value for money.

Although the majority of the above hosting solution providers provide pricing for their various hosting options on their website, Amazon’s pricing for its EC2 Cloud hosting solution is listed as a fixed cost but rather is based on the requirements you specify. But for the sake of comparison in this post, we’ve selected the lowest hosting solution requirements we could in Amazon’s pricing calculator, to get pricing for the Amazon EC2 hosting solution.

For more accurate pricing for the Amazon EC2 hosting solution, you should use Amazon’s pricing calculator

So let’s look at the lowest hosting solution options offered by each of the above 4 providers, in terms of the specifications (Number of CPUs available in the plan, RAM, Storage) and the pricing/month each option.

Comparison – Best Hosting Solution Providers

The chart below shows a comparison of the most basic instances offered by the above four best hosting solution providers.

Conclusion

As you can see, in terms of price the Linode hosting solution offers the best value for money at $10/month, followed by Amazon’s EC2 at $14.64/month, then RackSpace at $29.20/month. The most costly solution of all four was the one offered by Acquia Cloud at $165.50/month. So as far as pricing goes, the winner is “Linode”.

But this is not really an apples to apples comparison because we didn’t take into consideration the Virtual Machine’s performance (based on the specifications each hosting solution offers). If we consider performance or the specifications offered, Acquia Cloud would be the best option since it not only offers the highest specifications for its hosting solution, but also the best technical support out of all four. That is why they are charging a premium price as compared to the other hosting providers. Acquia’s hosting solution is also optimized for the Drupal CMS, so if you are looking for a hosting solution for a Drupal website (and if you have the budget) I would highly recommend Acquia’s hosting solution.

If on the other hand you’re looking for a hosting solution for a website that will be running CPU intensive tasks, or for running web apps that have an unpredictable load and need to scale up and down easily and quickly, or even just to run your site for the short term, then you should go for Amazon’s EC2 Cloud hosting solution or Rackspace’s cloud servers.

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