So you want to host in the cloud?

The most notable cloud hosting providers at the moment are Amazon and Rackspace. Outside of the big guys there are quite a few other cloud hosting providers that are popping up. It’s a nice, assuming profitable niche that has been gaining some recent popularity.

Cloud hosting at the present time doesn’t just refer to a farm of servers, although that’s really what it should define. Currently VPS hosts are somewhat/kinda considered cloud hosts, mostly for the fact that you can increase or decrease your memory footprint whenever.  The big difference though between true cloud hosting and the psuedo cloud hosting with a VPS is that with a true cloud you can scale up and down immediately, with a VPS it requires a reboot to expand your memory footprint. With a true cloud it’s pretty much like moving a slider to the left or right as needed and results are instant. Also another thing to note regarding cloud hosting is that it also refers to the virtual(everything is run through virtual machine software) nature of this type of hosting which is why a VPS fits into this bucket.

Here are some alternatives to the two big cloud hosting providers, I haven’t tried them all but have tried a handful of them.

• Slicehost – They are actually powered by Rackspace but I prefer Slicehost’s support over Rackspace. Gasp. I know Rackspace has amazing support…I’ve had a few bad conversations with them, Slicehost never and they have a chat room that a few of the Slicehost guys sit in that you can go in and ask questions whenever. One big difference though between Slicehost and Rackspace cloud is that Rackspace offers cloud files(similar to S3) which you can access from the same panel, not a deal breaker for me though.
• Linode – Really fast boxes and one of the most affordable options for cloud(VPS) hosting.
• FlexiScale – These guys are located in the UK so if you need to reduce latency issues(Amazon just opened up an EC2 location in the UK) they might be worth a look at.
• Go Grid – They offer cloud servers as well as cloud file hosting similar to S3. Also, if Windows servers are your thing(yuck) they offer those as well.
• VPS Net- They also offer CDN services in addition to Cloud hosting.
• Voxel – You get to take advantage of Voxel’s awesome CDN network, it’s a pretty big one.  They also have datacenters in the US, Amsterdam and Singapore. They also offer the ability to pay for managed support on your box.
• Heroku only focuses on hosting Ruby on Rails applications and they do a really good job at it.  Between their easy scaling options and their ruby gem it’s a really great company to host with.
• vCloud Express – They start at $0.36 per hour which is really cheap but that could possibly be noticeable in other areas.
• Rimu Hosting – These guys have been around for a long time but I’ve never used them. Their prices seem a bit off from everyone else and vary based on data centers which is a bit strange.
• SoftLayer – They offer cloud computing, dedicated boxes, cloud storage as well as a CDN.  They are a bit on the pricey end with their base server starting at $99 a month.
• Joyent

Want to start your own cloud hosting company or data center? Take a look at Open Nebula, it’s an open source toolkit for cloud computing.

What other companies did I miss? What are your favorites?