21 Best AWS Alternatives & Competitors (Feb. 2024)

Best Aws Alternatives Competitors

Although the Amazon Web Services cloud is a popular choice, the best AWS alternatives and competitors often enable online businesses to reduce costs with cheap file storage and free MySQL database services.

Virtualization allows web hosts to offer managed cloud services with many of the same perks of performance, dev tools, and uptime at a lower price. On a larger scale, public cloud hosts offer managed services with more options for developers, enabling them to create complex application environments.

Whether you need cloud hosting for a small project or enterprise organization, take a look at our rankings of these low-cost managed cloud alternatives to AWS.

Best Cheap AWS Alternatives: $6/Month or Less

Alternatives to AWS for small businesses are available from many web hosts, where the cheapest plans are cPanel servers that include a vast array of open-source developer options. Cheap AWS alternatives typically offer a managed LAMP stack with performance optimization.

In the rankings below, we focus on the cheapest web hosting plans that support MySQL database applications and include free, open-source tools for developers. Small businesses can save the most by leveraging the combination of managed cloud and open-source software solutions in one platform.

The best cheap AWS alternatives for 2024 are:

1. Kamatera.com

Kamatera review

Monthly Starting Price $4.00

  • Ultimate scalability with limitless customizations
  • Create and deploy servers in 60 seconds
  • Easily add load balancers and firewalls
  • Stellar 99.95% uptime guarantee
  • Sign up today for a 30-day FREE trial
  • Get started on Kamatera now.

CLOUD
RATING
4.9 ★★★★★ Our Review

Kamatera: Our Expert's Review

Laura Bernheim (HostingAdvice.com): Starting with more than 60 operating system images to choose from, Kamatera is a strong option for developers who know exactly what environment works best for their project. Customize your cloud server as needed and deploy in less than a minute. Go to full review »

Setup Time Disk Space CPU RAM
5 minutes 20 GB SSD - 4 TB SSD 1 - 32 cores 1 GB - 128 GB

Kamatera is another great example of a high-performance cloud hosting company that has been in business since the first days of the web. Kamatera operates proprietary datacenters in New York, Texas, California, Amsterdam, London, Hong Kong, and Israel.

Kamatera offers a unique hybrid cloud platform with products designed to suit the needs of business projects of any size.

Features:

  • Cloud servers with options for Linux or Windows with choice of control panel.
  • Block storage system at the lowest rates per gigabyte in the web hosting industry.
  • Fully managed cloud options available for audited enterprise requirements.
  • Microsoft Azure specialist services for private cloud and software development.

The company provides self-service virtualized hardware that is available for deployment instantly under both managed and unmanaged plans. Cloud storage is available at great rates on SSD or HDD hardware.

Business owners and software developers can sign up for Kamatera products for free and most bill at low rates under the pay-as-you-go approach.

This way, you only pay for the amount of compute, storage, bandwidth, and other resources used per month on VMs.

This cloud provider is recommended for relational database hosting and virtual machine orchestration.

2. HostGator.com

HostGator review

Monthly Starting Price $4.95

  • 2x as fast and 4x the computing resources
  • Tons of storage with the scalability of the cloud
  • Low-density servers and multiple caching layers
  • Unlimited domains and MySQL databases
  • Upgrades available for security, backups, productivity, and domain privacy
  • Get started on HostGator now.

CLOUD
RATING
4.8 ★★★★★ Our Review

HostGator: Our Expert's Review

Ryan Frankel (HostingAdvice.com): For those ready to expand beyond shared hosting, HostGator offers a fully featured step into the cloud. With scalable, high-powered resources, customers can easily monitor resources and caching from an intuitive dashboard. Go to full review »

Setup Time Disk Space CPU RAM
7 minutes 120 GB SSD - 240 GB SSD 2 - 4 cores 2 - 8 GB

The best cloud hosting plan for beginner users is HostGator. HostGator provides the industry standard for cPanel web servers with all LAMP hardware optimized for runtime support.

The price on HostGator’s cloud hosting platform is one of the cheapest on the web and is designed for ease of use and developer flexibility.

Features:

  • Integrated caching, load balancing, and data mirroring for best performance.
  • Single domain plans include 2 dedicated CPUs and 2 GB RAM per account.
  • 2x faster performance speeds through the use of low-density, premium hardware.
  • Enhanced cPanel management of web servers and domains with security tools.

Low-density servers, premium hardware, and multiple caching layers translate into HostGator’s cloud computing platform, which produces twice as much speed and provides up to four times as many resources as its well-equipped shared hosting services.

The hosting company automatically distributes three mirrored copies of your data to various devices. In case of a hardware problem, your site will automatically failover to another server and remain available to your visitors.

The engineers at HostGator manage state-of-the-art datacenters in Texas and Utah, and customers can choose the residency of hardware by availability zone.

3. Hostwinds.com

Hostwinds review

Monthly Starting Price $4.99

  • Choose your OS or application configuration
  • Hourly or monthly billing for convenience
  • Optional upgrades for cPanel, backups, and more
  • Managed services, SSDs, and HDDs available
  • Block and object storage, plus enterprise firewall
  • Get started on Hostwinds now.

CLOUD
RATING
4.6 ★★★★★ Our Review

Hostwinds: Our Expert's Review

Laura Bernheim (HostingAdvice.com): Hostwinds provides supremely scalable and customizable options for the savvy developer or site owner. Customers can customize their cloud environment or choose pre-built configurations optimized to run apps like WordPress, Drupal, and others. Go to full review »

Setup Time Disk Space CPU RAM
6 minutes 30 GB SSD - 750 GB SSD 1 - 16 cores 1 - 96 GB

Hostwinds is an independent cloud hosting company that also maintains its own datacenters in Seattle, Dallas, and Amsterdam. The facilities are audited with a Tier 3 rating and SAS Type II designation.

With Hostwinds, there are a wide number of pre-configured options for both beginner users and advanced developers to access. The single-domain shared hosting plan is a cheap way to build on a high-performance platform with the ability to expand to a VM or VPS as a cloud solution.

Features:

  • cPanel, Softaculous, and Weebly for open source script installation on LAMP.
  • Single-domain plan includes unlimited storage and monthly bandwidth.
  • Cloud server VM platform available under pay-as-you-go approach to billing.
  • Upgrade from Basic to Business hosting for LiteSpeed server configurations.

The Hostwinds platform makes it easy to host apps on Apache, NGINX, LiteSpeed, or other custom web server configurations. Your server will be ready to deploy within 20 seconds from whichever regions you choose.

VMs work with Docker development pipelines, and site owners can easily add large amounts of block or object storage.

Choose cheap rates with high-performance at Hostwinds as an alternative to AWS service plans. The Hostwinds cloud computing service is great for professional software development teams.

4. A2Hosting.com

A2 Hosting review

Monthly Starting Price $5.00

  • Ultra-fast SwiftServer platform with FREE SSDs
  • Quick Start Cloud configures servers in minutes
  • Root access and on-demand server controls
  • Optional Cloudflare web application firewall for added speed and security
  • Softaculous and cPanel upgrades available
  • Get started on A2 Hosting now.

CLOUD
RATING
4.6 ★★★★★ Our Review

A2 Hosting: Our Expert's Review