If you are shopping for a good Cloud Hosting service for your next website, you are in luck. There are hundreds – even thousands – of cloud hosting services to choose from, so it should be easy to find a good one for your site, right? Well, not really. The market for cloud hosting services is so competitive right now. Service providers are offering more features for less, better discounts and even freebies to attract your business. So, how do we find a good service plan to use?

Reasonable Price

If it’s too good to be true, it probably is. The same principle applies to cloud hosting too. If the service is too cheap and offers a lot of features and bonuses – or in other words, too good to be true – then it may not be the one to go for. Cloud hosting services are very affordable, so there is no need to go for a service package that’s too cheap.

You can expect to pay anything from $1 to $5 per month on a shared cloud hosting service. A cloud VPS should cost anything between $5 to $120 or more, depending on the server resources included in the service package. As mentioned earlier, they are indeed very affordable.

Amazing Offers

Another thing to spot is amazing offers. These offers usually come with very specific terms; be sure to understand them before making any purchase decision. When you see a cloud hosting company offering unlimited bandwidth, for instance, you need to carefully read the fine print. Web hosting companies pay for bandwidth to support their servers. Offering unlimited bandwidth without some form of control is almost impossible.

You may see limitations attached to these offers. With unlimited bandwidth, there is usually a set of fair usage policies that you must follow. For example, you cannot offer downloadable files from the server. This limits the way you can use the service rather substantially.

Instead of going for unrealistic offers, it is much better to find a cloud hosting service plan that suits your needs perfectly. Using the previous example, you can easily find a cloud hosting account with 1TB or more of monthly data transfer, more than you will ever need to run a successful website.

Reviews

I always take my time and read reviews whenever I need a new cloud hosting service. Reading reviews is a great way of getting to know the cloud hosting company and the quality of services it offers. Naturally, you should take each review with a grain of salt.

There will be several bad reviews, even when you are looking into a famously reliable web hosting company. This is not uncommon; to be honest, I have yet to see a web hosting company that can maintain 100% positive reviews.

A good way to get a clear picture of what to expect by reading reviews is to do the following:

– Find user reviews; by user reviews, I mean reviews written by actual users and not reviewers. You can usually spot these reviews on blogs, online forums and other resource centers.

– Check for web address when reading reviews. Let’s say yourdomain.com is using cloud hosting A. You can then visit the site to get a better picture of what to expect from the hosting company.

– Don’t hesitate to contact the reviewer directly to ask questions. Most of the time, site owners who are happy with a cloud hosting service will be more than happy to recommend it to other site owners.

– Social media is a great way to get references and recommendations. Ask about recommended cloud hosting services on Twitter or Facebook and you will get a lot of great insights.

Guarantees

Any good cloud hosting company will stand by its services. This is why you see guarantees being advertised with some of the best web hosting services. Since cloud hosting is very reliable by nature thanks to the use of multiple physical servers, you can expect the uptime guarantee to be as high as 99.5%. Money back guarantee – or a free-trial period – is also quite common.

What’s important about these guarantees is to check the implications when they are not met. Uptime guarantee, for instance, should come with terms regarding compensations when it is not met at the end of the month. Should the server go offline and your site is inaccessible for more than 0.5% of the time, you will be compensated in return.

Of course, no one wants to deal with outages and server issues, which is why it is important to get it right in the first place. Spot the red flags, find a reasonable yet suitable cloud hosting service package, work with a reputable company and you will be able to maintain the smooth operations of your site without a problem. There are so many options to choose from out there, so take your time and settle for nothing but the best.