When evaluating cloud hosting services, we focus on several key factors to ensure our recommendations are reliable and well-informed.
First, the hands-on testing. During my time working with several large, international IT companies in the US, Taiwan, and Japan, I have professional experience using six of the seven cloud hosting services in our list (DigitalOcean being the exclusion). My experience with DigitalOcean comes from running personal sites, including one in the US that previously saw over 500,000 visitors per month (until Google’s controversial Helpful Content Update) and another recently launched in Japan.
This experience allows me, to the best of my ability, to access the user experience, ease of setup, costs, performance metrics (i.e. uptime, load times, etc.) and overall functionality.
Then there’s customer feedback. The problem with reviews is that you can’t take one person’s word for it. Gathering hundreds of review ratings and comments from actual users helps us assess the services from other perspectives and get closer to the “truth.”
Then, of course, we compare features, pricing, and security, as these elements can vary over time and between providers.
Finally, we conduct additional research on each provider, including reviewing industry reports, expert opinions, and the company’s overall reputation in the market.
By combining all of this (that is, the years of hands-on experience, feedback from real users, and other research), we’re able to properly evaluate these cloud services and provide cloud hosting recommendations that are practical and trustworthy.
