Best Cloud hosting in 2026
Cloud hosting providers rent you virtual servers in their data centers, billed by the hour or second and usually capped at a monthly price, so you can run a website, an API, a self-hosted tool or an AI agent without buying hardware. This category compares developer clouds for startups and small teams, starting with DigitalOcean, Vultr and Hetzner.
Paid servers start at $2.50 a month at Vultr (IPv6 only) and $4 at DigitalOcean, while Hetzner's Regular Performance servers start at $7.49 in Europe and $20.49 in its two US locations, plus $0.60 a month for an IPv4 address. DigitalOcean and Vultr also sell managed databases, managed Kubernetes and cloud GPUs, while Hetzner offers none of them as cloud services. Server backups cost extra at all three, and DDoS protection is free at DigitalOcean and Hetzner but $10 a month per server at Vultr.
Each provider is marked Yes, No, Partial or Add-on on the same ten features, from free trials to regions and bandwidth. Prices are in US dollars, from each vendor's pricing and documentation pages.
Our ranking
Developer cloud with Droplet virtual servers from $4 a month, plus managed Kubernetes, databases, storage and GPUs.
German cloud servers billed hourly up to a monthly cap; large EU traffic allowances, two US locations, no free trial.
Hourly-billed cloud servers in 33 regions, plus GPUs, bare metal, managed databases and Kubernetes.
Akamai-owned cloud, now sold as Akamai Cloud: servers from $5/month in 33 regions, plus Kubernetes, databases and GPUs.
AWS virtual servers at fixed monthly prices from $5 with a public IPv4 address, plus managed databases and storage.
Cloud provider with VPS from $5.35 a month, hourly Public Cloud instances, included traffic and free anti-DDoS.
Self-managed KVM servers in four plans, prepaid for 1, 12 or 24 months, with free weekly backups and DDoS filtering.
German VPS, dedicated and GPU servers rented by the month, with unlimited traffic and three US regions.
Unmanaged KVM VPS from $21.99 a year, hybrid servers from $39 a month and bare metal from $139; no hourly billing.
German VPS and root servers priced in euros, with a traffic flat rate, free DDoS protection and one US location.
Top 5 compared
| Feature | DigitalOcean | Hetzner | Vultr | Linode | Amazon Lightsail |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | Yes · $5 signup credit, expires 90 days after signup; covers all products except SaaS add-ons; a payment method is needed first | No · No trial or new-customer credit on the cloud pages; the cloud referral credit program has been discontinued | Yes · Coupons page (July 2026): $200, $250 or $300 credit for new customers on select products; one code per user; credits expire (period not stated); free 512 MB instance by application | Yes · $100 credit for new customers (60 days in Akamai's pricing FAQ and referral docs); a payment method is required; GPU plans excluded | Yes · Lightsail's own trials ended Aug 2026; new AWS accounts get $100 in credits plus up to $100 for activities, usable on Lightsail on the Free or Paid plan; Free plan up to 6 months |
| Managed databases | Yes · PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Valkey, Kafka, OpenSearch; from $15/month (Valkey; PostgreSQL and MySQL $15.15); free daily backups | No · No managed database service on the cloud pages; they name a database that is not publicly accessible as a use for private networks | Yes · MySQL, PostgreSQL and Valkey from $15/month (1 vCPU, 1 GB); Apache Kafka from $475/month (3 brokers) | Yes · MySQL and PostgreSQL from $16/month (1 node, 1 GB), 3-node clusters from $37; Valkey (limited availability) from $59; free daily backups kept 14 days | Yes · MySQL or PostgreSQL; Standard from $15/month (1 GB, 40 GB SSD), high availability plans cost double; free automatic backups with 7-day point-in-time restore |
| Managed Kubernetes | Yes · DigitalOcean Kubernetes: free control plane (high availability $40/month); Basic nodes from $12/month each, with free transfer from 2,000 GiB per node, pooled | No · No managed service; Kubernetes is listed as an integration, with private networks for running your own cluster | Yes · Vultr Kubernetes Engine: free control plane; you pay for worker nodes (2 GB RAM or more), load balancers and block storage; node pool autoscaling | Yes · LKE: free control plane, high-availability control plane from $60/month; LKE Enterprise (approved customers) $300/month per cluster; nodes, NodeBalancers, volumes at standard rates | No · No Kubernetes service in Lightsail; container services run Docker containers from $7/month per node (0.25 shared vCPU, 512 MB) |
| Object storage | Yes · Spaces (S3-compatible): $5/month incl. 250 GiB and 1 TiB outbound; then $0.02/GiB stored, $0.01/GiB transfer; 12 of 13 regions | Partial · S3-compatible, $7.99/month base incl. 1 TB storage and 1 TB egress; only in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki, not in the US | Yes · S3-compatible; Standard $18/month for 1 TB stored and 1 TB transfer; Premium ($36), Performance ($50), Accelerated ($100) and Archival ($6) tiers per TB | Yes · S3-compatible; $5/month incl. 250 GB stored and 1 TB added to the transfer pool; then $0.02/GB stored, $0.005/GB transfer; in more than 20 regions | Yes · Buckets from $1/month (5 GB, 25 GB transfer), $3 (100 GB) or $5 (250 GB); overage $0.023/GB stored and $0.09/GB transfer in US regions |
| GPU instances | Yes · GPU Droplets on demand from $0.76/GPU/hour (RTX 4000 Ada); also L40S, RTX 6000 Ada, H100, H200, AMD MI300X, MI325X; more on contract | Partial · No GPU cloud servers; GPU-Line dedicated servers with NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs from $249/month plus a $249 setup fee, in Germany and Finland only | Yes · Billed hourly from $0.471/hour (1 NVIDIA A16); the pricing page also lists NVIDIA L40S, A40, A100, H100 and B200 and AMD MI300X, MI325X and MI355X | Yes · Hourly, no monthly cap: NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada from $0.52/hour, Quadro RTX 6000 from $1.50, RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell from $3; HGX B300 by quote; a $100 deposit may be needed | Partial · Only in Lightsail for Research (not offered in N. Virginia): GPU XL (4 vCPUs, 16 GB) from $2.37/hour in Ohio and Oregon, up to GPU 4XL; regular Lightsail bundles have no GPUs |
| Automatic backups | Add-on · Weekly 20% or daily 30% of the Droplet price; usage-based plans from $0.01/GiB/month, up to every 4 hours, 3 days to 6 months kept | Add-on · Daily backups with 7 slots per server for 20% of the server's price | Add-on · +20% of the instance price; daily, every other day, weekly or monthly; attached Block Storage not included; snapshots $0.05/GB a month | Add-on · From $2/month (Nanode) or $5 (4 GB plans); daily, weekly and biweekly backups plus one manual snapshot; automated ones kept at most 14 days; volumes not included | Add-on · Daily automatic snapshots of Linux instances and disks, 7 kept, free to turn on; storage $0.05/GB-month; not for Windows; databases back up free |
| DDoS protection | Yes · Free, on by default for Droplets, Kubernetes, databases, load balancers and reserved IPs; layers 3 and 4 only | Yes · Automatic DDoS protection, free of charge for all customers; the docs say Ashburn uses the same system as the other sites | Add-on · Optional, $10/month per instance for 10 Gbps of mitigation capacity; offered in all 33 regions | Yes · Included with compute services and always on; blocks UDP, SYN and HTTP floods inline and reroutes attack traffic over Akamai's backbone | Yes · AWS Shield Standard: automatic layer 3 and 4 protection for all AWS customers at no extra charge; the Lightsail pages themselves do not mention it |
| Uptime SLA | Yes · 99.99% monthly uptime per Droplet; below that, a 100% credit on the affected Droplet's charges | Yes · 99.9% monthly availability per cloud server; downtime beyond that is credited on request as Cloud Credits, up to 100% of the server's monthly invoice | Yes · 100% uptime guarantee for network and host node; credits from 12 hours to 672 hours (1 month) of service, requested by support ticket | Yes · 99.99% monthly uptime for compute instances in general availability (99% in limited availability); pro-rata credit, by ticket within 30 days of the month's end | Yes · 99.5% per instance; 99.99% per Region for instances in 2+ Availability Zones; credits 10%, 30% or 100% by support case; 99.95% for high availability databases |
| Data center regions | Yes · 13 regions / 6 US (New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Richmond, Kansas City, Memphis); newer US regions offer fewer Droplet plans | Partial · 6 locations / 2 US (Ashburn, VA and Hillsboro, OR); US sites lack Object Storage and Cost-Optimized servers | Yes · 33 / 9 US: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Miami, New Jersey, Seattle, Silicon Valley | Yes · 33 core / 10 US (Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Fremont, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Seattle, 2 in Washington, DC); 11 distributed regions on request | Yes · 19 AWS Regions / 3 US (N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon); Hong Kong, Jakarta, Malaysia and Spain must be enabled before use |
| Included bandwidth | Yes · From 500 GiB/month on the $4 Droplet, more on larger plans; pooled across a team's Droplets; overage $0.01/GiB; inbound free | Yes · Per server a month: at least 20 TB in the EU, 1-8 TB in the US by size; extra outbound traffic $1.20 per TB in the EU and US; inbound free | Yes · Per plan (1 TB on the $5 server, 2 TB on the $6 High Performance) plus 2 TB free per account a month; inbound free; overage $0.01/GB | Yes · 1-20 TB a month on Shared, High Memory and G6/G7 Dedicated plans, pooled; none on G8 and most GPU plans; overage $0.005/GB ($0.015 Jakarta, $0.007 São Paulo); inbound free | Yes · 1 TB to 10 TB/month per bundle, inbound counted too, pooled per bundle type and Region; overage on outbound only, $0.09/GB in US; half in 6 Regions |