Back in 2007 I got a shared hosting account from Hostmonster which claimed to offer me “300GB of space” which was later upgraded to “Unlimited“, “3000GB monthly bandwidth” which was later upgraded to “Unlimited“, “Unlimited MySQL databases“,  “Unlimited mails“, etc. all for a meager amount of 5.95 USD/month. I felt as if I had all the power in the web but soon realized all the “Unlimiteds” were awfully limited. Although I had a shell access for the account, the best I could do with it was copy or move files. I couldn’t install anything onto it or modify anything I needed. What good was all the unlimited for when you had small limits on processor timings and memory usage. Especially when hundreds of shared hosted sites are hosted on the same server its only a matter of time when your site becomes listed as a malware website with Google and co just because some unscrupulous user setup a malware website on the same server as yours. Then I felt the need of having a dedicated server. Now we run Ajatus on a dedicated server which we got for a steal of a deal from Serverminds.

But, now times have changed, for a blogger of today what is the best option to host his websites along with the freedom of trying out his hands on the various components of his server? It can’t be shared hosting, and dedicated web servers are a tad bit too expensive for him. VPS (Virtual Private Servers) is another option where the hosting provider gives the user slices on servers shared over a visualization layer like that of XEN or VMWare. But, VPS are also not very recommended if you have a hunch that your site might need scaling because of a rise in traffic, as it limits the users scope for scaling without moving entire data and setup and their price are also not as reasonable. So what other option are we left with, Cloud Servers, for most of us it might sound something which would be extremely expensive and an enterprise solution. But the fact is its not at all expensive when it comes for a starting user with minimalistic requirements, provided that you choose the right hosting provider. I will provide a small price comparison of the most popular Cloud Server hosts later in this post. So, what is Cloud computing all about? Cloud Computing can be considered as an extended VPS which can be seamlessly scaled dynamically over the Internet. Amazon is one of the largest providers of Cloud computing infrastructures. But except for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) all others seemed pretty much expensive to me especially the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). So, what can you do with a cloud server? Well on a cloud server you can do everything that you can do on a dedicated server with an added option of dynamic scalability. You can host your blogs, experiment with all sorts of fancy technologies and once you feel you are going out of resources ask your service provider to expand your Cloud Server in-terms of memory, storage or processor cycle limits. Having told all this lets have  look at the pricing for a minimalistic Cloud Server configuration provided by some of the Industry leaders:

Amazon EC2: For the smallest Cloud Server they charge 0.10 USD/hour that makes it 0.1 x 24 x 30 = 72 USD/month. For the same price you could easily rent a dual Opteron Dedicated Server with 2GB memory for your self.

Aptana Cloud: Their pricing for 256 MB memory and 5 GB storage is  20 USD/month. This seems a bit more reasonable. Actually this would also be the price of an equivalent VPS.

RackspaceCloud or Mosso CloudFS: Their pricing seemed the best to me. For 256 MB memory and 10 GB storage they charge on 1.5 cents/hour or 10.95USD/month. Now that is extremely low. This is just a little bit more than what most of the shared hosting provider charge for their pseudo “Unlimited” hosting. What more whenever your site seems to soar up in traffic just dynamically add another Cloud Server and share your load.

GoGrid Cloud Hosting: Their minimum offering is half a Gig of Memory and 30 GB of storage at a price of 0.095 USD/hour = 68.4 USD/month. This also seems high for a beginer.

There are other Cloud Computing service providers also, but most of their offerings target the enterprise more than to the  personal usage. One such example is RightScale, although they provide Developer free trials their pricing is simply too expensive for a beginner.