The Best Fully Managed Cloud Hosting Services

With its ability to scale for virtually any amount of traffic, the east of use offered and reliable pricing that won’t break the bank cloud hosting has become one of the better options for small, medium and large scale businesses. Whether you need to host one or 100 websites cloud hosting will provide you with robust options that simply work. While you could go in alone and setup your own virtual cloud service there are several managed services that take the guest work out of cloud hosting. In this list of teh best fully managed cloud hosting services we examine Rackspace, Firehost, and Single Hop.

Rackspace Sites – Fully Managed Cloud Hosting

Fanatical support may be an understatement when it comes to dealing with Rackspace. I have been with the company for the last 18 months and I have yet to encounter any major issues from their Rackspace Sites cloud service.

The service starts at $150 and includes the following tools:

• 50GB of storage per month
• 500GB of bandwidth per month
• 10,000 compute cycles per month
• Unlimited domains

If for some reason you go over your allotment of data you can pay $2 per GB of additional storage, $.18 per GB of bandwidth and 2¢ per compute cycle. On the cloud Rackspace also offers $20 SSL certificats and $5 per 100mb for Microsoft SQL Server storage.

In case your curious 10,000 compute cycles is basically the equivalent of running a modern 2.8GHz process for one month.

Host unlimited websites and if you want to speed things up use the company’s new Cloud Database feature to remotely host your MySQL databases for approximately $50 per month.

Single Hop Public Cloud With Managed Hosting

Unlike Rackspace Single Hop allows users to scale their cloud usage as they deem necessary. For example users can start with 1 core processor at 2.4GHz , 1GB memory and 25GB of storage for just $50 per month.

As the users site or sites grow they can simply add more storage, processors and RAM as needed. Scaling on the fly is the secret to Single Hope’s Public Cloud Hosting success.

To make a users service fully manageable Single Hop offers a $69 per month plan which can be scaled by paying $25 for Kernel + OS updates. Single Hop also offers a $5 per month server side scanning package, $10 event notifications, $30 Quick reaction abilities and R1 Soft Backups for $1.50/GB.

Unlike Rackspace users can pick the more than just one instance of Windows or Linux OS types.

FireHost Secure Cloud Hosting With Managed Services

FireHost offers the most expensive starting points for its services but its reputation proceeds it.

For a starting price of $200/month FireHost users receive 1 core processor, 30GB SAS Storage, and 1GB RAM.Just like Single Hop the FireHost system also allows for several different OS types to be chosen for both Windows and Linux.

Users also choose which database license they need, which Anti-virus their cloud server will use and which control panel they want to use. Many services are included in the price while others are premium upgrades.

FireHost is fully scaleable and the company offers 24/7 customer support.The best fully managed cloud hosting services all have three things in common: decent pricing, the ability to scale on the fly and amazing customer support.

I personally have chosen Rackspace because of its amazing Rackspace Files option with Akamai CDN support and Cloud Database storage among other options but for users just starting out Single Hop with its cheap starting point and ability to scale might be best. Enterprise users in the meantime might prefer the excellent enterprise support offered by both FireHost and Rackspace.

[Images via Tut Toaster, Managed, and Rackspace]