The last few years has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of cloud hosting offerings. Below is our listing of cloud hosting offerings, we have excluded offerings which are not truely cloud solutions (ie the plethora of shared hosting solutions which offer no scaling capabilities but just append ‘Cloud’ to the host’s name).
Amazon Web Services : The daddy of them all, AWS was the first and is still the most complete cloud hosting offering. The core of the service is the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which is essentially a server instance which can be programatically spun up or destroyed. EC2 is extremely powerful and customizable, instances can be geographically located in any region, Elastic IP addresses allow for IP’s to be associated with an EC2 instance, the newly introduced CloudWatch allows for monitoring of EC2 instances. In addition EC2 allows for auto-scaling and elastic load balancing across EC2 instances.
The AWS database offerings includes Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) which is essentially cloud-based MySQL, and SimpleDB which is a lightweight non-relational database.
CloudFront is the AWS Content Delivery Network (CDN) which has 14 edge locations and has been well integrated into AWS’s storage solutions (S3).
The one criticsm of AWS is that it is not as easy to use and the components are not as tightly integrated as other cloud offerings.
RackSpace Cloud : Rackspace moved into cloud hosting approximately 2 years ago with two cloud offerings – Cloud Sites and Cloud Servers. Cloud Sites is a very standardized offering which is suitable for websites which run on a classic LAMP or Windows stack. Cloud Servers is comparable to AWS and is a fully provisioned server with access to the OS etc. Cloud servers is clearly aimed at the power user however it lacks some of the features of AWS such as Elastic IP address and CloudWatch.
Rackspace Cloud provides static file storage via Cluod Files offering which can be integreated with its CDN (which is actually a re-offering of Limelight Network’s powerful CDN).
Read our RackSpace Cloud Sites review .
Google AppEngine : Technically this is a cloud hosting solution but as the name suggests it is more of a proprietary system for building apps. User reports seem to indicate that the system is very stable and scalable. The primary issue with looking at the AppEngine as a cloud hosting provider is that apps are normally built specifically for the AppEngine and will not necessary be transferable to other providers.
GoGrid : GoGrid is very similar to RackSpace Cloud’s server offerings in that it provides a simple intuitive web interface for managing server instances. In its intial stages there were numberous reports of downtime on the system, however these issues seem to have been solved since mid-2009.
RightScale : Not technically a separate provider as they are in essence a reseller of Amazon’s AWS, but RightScale offers a very useful platform for customers to quickly create scalable Web applications running on AWS. . RightScale claims that it is the only end-to-end management platform for AWS for quickly creating a highly scalable environment for hosting large web applications. Rightscale is suitable for large web apps which require 3 or more Amazon Web Services EC2 instances.