Best Cheap Cloud Hosting Services To Save Money in 2025

IONOS is the best option for cheap cloud hosting, offering fantastic value for the money. However, it’s better for advanced users. Cloudways, meanwhile, provides an easy way to get set up on several major cloud providers, and Hostinger offers affordable managed cloud hosting to make your life easier.

Which one is best for you? We’re here to help you figure that out with our firsthand testing of IONOS, Cloudways, and Hostinger.

The best cheapest cloud hosting services

Compare the cheapest cloud hosting services

Best for	Best value	Best for easy custom solutions	Best for ease of use
Star rating	4.7 AllAboutCookies writers and editors score products based on a number of objective features as well as our expert editorial assessment. Our partners do not influence how we rate products.	4.3 AllAboutCookies writers and editors score products based on a number of objective features as well as our expert editorial assessment. Our partners do not influence how we rate products.	4.9 AllAboutCookies writers and editors score products based on a number of objective features as well as our expert editorial assessment. Our partners do not influence how we rate products.
Starting price	Starts at $1.00/mo	Starts at $11.00/mo	Starts at $1.95/mo
Money-back guarantee	Yes — 30 days		Yes — 30 days
Uptime guarantee	99.99%	99.99%	99.9%
Dedicated IP address	Costs extra	On all plans	On all plans
Pricing	Pay as you go	Pay as you go	Fixed
CPU cores	1 - 16	1 - 32	2 - 6
RAM	2 GB - 64 GB	1 GB - 64 GB	3 GB - 12 GB
Storage	60 GB - 960 GB	20 GB - 640 GB	100 GB - 300 GB
Free domain for a year			On all plans
Learn more	Get IONOS Read IONOS Web Hosting Review	Get Cloudways Read Cloudways Review	Get Hostinger Read Hostinger Web Hosting Review

IONOS: Best value

What we liked

Affordable pricing: With its preconfigured cloud plans starting at $1.00/mo per 30 days, IONOS is one of the most affordable options currently on the market. This makes it quick and easy for anyone on a budget to get started with cloud hosting.

Great performance: As you’ll see from our test results below, IONOS’ servers are fast, reliable, and resilient. This is exactly what you want from any cloud platform.

Easy scalability: IONOS makes it easy to increase the server resources available to your website at a moment’s notice. In a way, this is the whole point of cloud hosting, and IONOS does it well.

What we didn’t like

Lengthy approval process: It’s not often that companies make you wait to become a customer, but IONOS apparently likes to take its time. The approval process can take up to 72 hours. During our testing, it took over 48 hours to get started. That’s something to consider if you’re in a rush to launch your site.

Test results

IONOS performed very, very well in our tests with good performance scores, 100% uptime, and respectable server response times. It also handled the stress test pretty much flawlessly, so you don’t have to worry about traffic spikes taking down your site. Especially not on cloud hosting.

Star rating summary

We score hosts based on a variety of criteria, but the Features, Performance, and Security categories are most important. IONOS has a generally solid feature set, but its cloud hosting is more suited to advanced users. The security features and server performance scored well, though.

Cloudways: Best for easy custom solutions

What we liked

Great customizability: Cloudways doesn’t run its own servers; instead, it serves as an admin interface for managing cloud hosting instances on Google Cloud, AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr. Just pick the one you want, and build the solution you need.

Ease of use: Cloudways’ admin interface comes with bells and whistles, such as simple WordPress installation, easy staging environments, and other one-click solutions to common problems. This simplifies the process of managing cloud hosting on platforms that are typically meant for developers.

Migration assistance: In keeping with the theme, Cloudways can help you migrate an existing website to cloud hosting if you need it. If you’re new to cloud hosting, this could be quite useful to you.

What we didn’t like

Limited freebies: Unlike other hosting providers, Cloudways doesn’t include domain registration or email hosting with its plans. Because Cloudways focuses on offering high-speed servers with reliable performance, it leverages third-party add-ons for users to purchase extras.

Test results

We chose DigitalOcean as the underlying cloud provider for Cloudways, and we weren’t disappointed. Loading times were low, though the average response time for the servers could have been lower. The uptime fell a little bit short of the 99.99% guarantee in our testing, but it was still pretty good overall.

Star rating summary

Cloudways skimps a little bit on the features, selling more than a few of them as add-ons instead of including them in the plans. And that’s why, in this case, the Features category gets only 4/5. But the security features and performance (depending on the cloud provider you choose) can’t be faulted.

Hostinger: Best for ease of use

What we liked

Ease of use: Hostinger offers managed cloud hosting, with a simple and intuitive control panel so you can get a website set up on cloud infrastructure with minimal fuss. Hostinger puts a special emphasis on making things easy, and we like that.

Dedicated IP address: Cloud hosting doesn’t always come with a dedicated IP address, but you probably want one. It’ll be useful if you have custom-built infrastructure for your website, or if you want to access a cloud server directly without a domain.

Email included: Sometimes you just need an email address on your own domain. Hostinger includes this. You’d have to set it up yourself on IONOS or pay extra on Cloudways.

What we didn’t like

Mildly expensive renewal prices: Hostinger’s not wildly expensive, but its cheapest cloud hosting plan renews at $25.99/mo. But then, it’s managed cloud hosting — where all the technical stuff is handled for you, so it’s not a bad option by any means.

Test results

Hostinger passed our performance tests handily, with decent site performance scores and reasonable average loading times. What’s more, the servers were wonderfully stable, with 100% uptime, and quite low server response times.

Star rating summary

In our review, Hostinger scored 5/5 across most categories, with only pricing and support experience leaving anything to be desired. And even those categories scored pretty well overall, all things considered.

Is cloud hosting more expensive than other hosting options?

It really depends. IONOS, with its cloud hosting instance starting at $1.00/mo, for example, is quite affordable. Plenty of shared hosting plans and even some VPS plans cost about the same, or around $10 or more after renewal.

But cloud providers can be quite expensive (especially in the short term) if you’re constantly getting lots of traffic and using lots of server resources. Or if you go with SiteGround, where the price starts at $100/mo.

On the other hand, you can also save money and time that you’d otherwise spend fussing around with servers by just scaling up your cloud hosting plan when you need it. Cloud hosting is also good at handling traffic spikes and avoiding downtime, which can cost much more in other ways.

It all depends on your use case, really.

How does cloud hosting work?

Traditional shared hosting and VPS hosting work by basically selling you a bit of space and server resources on a single physical server. Cloud hosting is basically when you have a bunch of small micro-programs that work together to create a larger system. You can run this system on a single server, or spread it across multiple physical machines and have them all work together.

This allows cloud platforms to host your website while minimizing the likelihood of downtime and better handling spikes in traffic. Cloud hosting is useful, but often a little more expensive than shared hosting, for example. However, shared and VPS hosting can also run on cloud infrastructure, making them more resilient.

Bottom line: The cheapest cloud hosting service to save money

If all you’re looking for is cheap cloud hosting, IONOS is your best bet. It has the best price-to-value ratio on this list, and great performance to boot. On the other hand, Cloudways makes a strong case for itself with its combination of ease of use and control, and Hostinger is a solid option for managed cloud hosting at a reasonable fixed rate.

They’re all worth considering.

FAQs