2024’s Latest Cloud Hosting Statistics 

I’m going to be honest with you, my friend: I think cloud hosting is the best web hosting service for beginners. While some experts recommend shared hosting for newbies, that’s not always the best option.

If you’re worth your salt, your website is likely to get consistent spikes in traffic. With cloud hosting, you can easily adjust resources like CPU power, RAM, and storage space to meet your traffic and performance needs. Shared hosting is quite limited in this respect.

Cloud hosting resources are spread across multiple servers, which offers redundancy. The cherry on top is administrative server access (with unmanaged plans). Simply put, if you have a decent budget (more on this soon), you shouldn’t even consider shared hosting.

That’s enough cloud web hosting pep talk — it’s time to dive into the exciting stuff. Here are some fascinating cloud hosting statistics!

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud are goliaths in the cloud infrastructure services space. I mean, they control around 66% of the market, with AWS leading the way (31%), followed by Azure (25%) and Google Cloud (10%).¹

Here’s an exercise for you: Can you guess which AWS cloud services are most popular? If you thought of Amazon EC2 or Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), please give yourself a pat on the back!

Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud are unsurprisingly at the top of the cloud vendor revenue rankings. I’m not going to lie; I expected AWS to reign at the top, but oh well — Azure is a worthy competitor.

With revenue of $33.7 billion in fiscal year 2024, Azure generated approximately $9.5 billion more than AWS.² Just to quench your curiosity, Salesforce and Oracle make the rest of the top five list (in that order).

Cloud computing really is the new “it.” Overall expenditure on cloud computing services is expected to exceed $600 billion in 2024. Yes, you read that right — $600 billion. If you’re enjoying the perks of the work-from-home culture, you can thank the COVID-19 pandemic for accelerating cloud adoption among companies worldwide (I guess every cloud has a silver lining).

As employees transitioned to remote work, organizations needed a secure way to provide teams access to company data and applications. The rest is history. More than 94% of organizations are now using the cloud.³

I’m not done talking about AWS services just yet. Amazon S3 may sound like the name of Amazon’s newest smartphone (I wonder why Amazon hasn’t ventured back into the smartphone market since the failure of the “Fire Phone” in 2014), but it’s far from that. It’s actually an enterprise-grade cloud storage service that leads the market with a whopping share of more than 44%!

To put it into perspective, Pure Storage and NetApp rank second and third respectively and have a combined market share of approximately 14.5%.³ Talk about dominating the market.

It’s time to have some fun! Think of the apps you use most often. Every single app that stores your data on remote servers and requires internet connectivity to be fully functional is a cloud-based service.

This includes the first app I open at 7:30 each morning: Spotify (“Don’t You Cry” by Sunday Scaries is my current jam), X (my all-in-one news portal), Google Drive, Canva, Discord, and EA Sports FC 25 (I’m in love with the game).

In fact, we’re so dependent on cloud-based services that we use an average of 36 of them daily!⁴

I promised to touch upon the budget you’ll need to purchase a cloud hosting plan, so here we are (finally). I’m not going to “sell” cloud hosting anymore, as I’ve already said everything I needed to say on that.

Here are the numbers you need to know: Shared hosting costs between $2 to $10 per month, while the average monthly rate for a basic cloud hosting plan is $8.47 per month.⁵ A good plan can cost upward of $10 each month.

Basically, if you have an annual budget of a couple hundred dollars for web hosting, you should opt for cloud web hosting.

Do you know what a zettabyte (ZB) is? It’s one trillion gigabytes. To provide context, it would take one billion computer systems, each with a secondary memory capacity of 1,000 GB, to house one ZB. We’re expected to generate an astounding 200 ZB by 2025.

We’re generating an astronomical amount of data every day, and companies are scrambling to use it to create compelling user experiences.

Cloud storage has become the go-to resource for companies to store their data — can you imagine how much physical hardware a company would have to own without cloud storage services? It’s mind-boggling.

Businesses are so dependent on cloud storage solutions that around 60% of global corporate data is stored in the cloud.⁴

According to survey data, only about 40% of businesses believe their cloud costs are under control (I always think of the Calvin Harris masterpiece when I write “under control”). More than half of businesses believe they overspent on cloud services in 2024.⁶

Everything has its pros and cons, and our dependence on cloud services is no exception. Now I get it: The cloud is like a shiny new toy that everyone wants to get their hands on.

What I don’t understand is how a significant percentage of these businesses don’t know exactly what’s driving these high cloud costs (I’ll spare you the details, but venture-backed companies are in a tough spot). I mean, if you don’t identify the root of your problems, how will you solve them?

When’s the last time you used a personal cloud storage service like Google Drive, iCloud, or Dropbox? I used Google Drive and iCloud in the past couple hours, and I’m not alone: Around 2.3 billion people use personal cloud storage services.⁴

The real question is, are you using a free service or a paid one? My recommendation is to traverse the free route ‘til you run out of storage!

You may be wondering, what’s a smartphone stat doing in a cloud hosting stat guide? Well, smartphones are a sucker for cloud services. Your favorite streaming services (Netflix and Spotify) and social media apps (Instagram and Snapchat) can’t function without them.

And if you run out of iCloud storage space, you might as well bid farewell to a whole host of old pictures — and lose those memories (I know how it feels).

Smartphones and the cloud are a match made in heaven, and we will see people using many, many more devices in just a few years. If you want numbers, there will be more than 7.7 billion smartphones by 2028.⁴

In fiscal year 2020, cloud computing spending was around $314 billion. Just four years later, this rose to more than $600 billion.³ It’s not long until cloud computing expenditure will hit $1 trillion, and hey, this is just the beginning.

The cloud industry has evolved in many ways, and its growth doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. If I were you, I’d be excited, as this means your favorite cloud-based applications are only going to get better.

For example, if you have a few songs you can’t get enough of, Spotify may use advanced AI/ML algorithms to create mind-blowing playlists that match your vibe. While there are apps that currently do this, they’re kind of hit and miss.

And here’s an even slicker example. Let’s say you’re using a smartwatch that’s connected to Spotify and are out on a run. Spotify could create a dynamic playlist that adjusts in real time based on your heartbeat. Imagine the pump!

Businesses are using cloud services to enhance user experiences, so rest assured the next iteration of cloud apps is going to absolutely kill it. I wonder what your favorite cloud service is?

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/967365/worldwide-cloud-infrastructure-services-market-share-vendor/
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1243513/top-10-cloud-vendors-by-revenue-fiscal-quarter-global/
3. https://colorlib.com/wp/cloud-computing-statistics
4. https://spacelift.io/blog/cloud-computing-statistics/
5. https://www.bluehost.com/blog/cloud-hosting-statistics/
6. https://www.cloudzero.com/state-of-cloud-cost/