4. Bytemark Cloud

A UK-based outfit which offers some unusual perks

Founded in 2002, Bytemark is a UK-based cloud hosting company which has designed its own public platform using open source software.

This in-house experience brings some unusual advantages. Bytemark has developed its own hosting environment to set up a server, email and more. It covers everything from installing and managing PHP, MySQL, Perl and Ruby on Rails to helping you configure your firewall, spam rules and backups.

Experienced users can manage their account with a command line client, or even automate common tasks by integrating with Bytemark's API.

Pricing seems fair. The baseline specification costs $14 (£10) for one core, 1GB RAM, 25GB storage, 1TB bandwidth and one IPv4, plus – unusually – one IPv6 address. If you need more, everything is available via a simple flat rate: $14 (£10) per 1GB RAM,  $2.80 (£2) per 10GB storage, $28 (£20) per extra 1TB of traffic. Unusually, you can even get a Windows licence for $2.64 (£2) per GB of memory.

As ever with cloud hosting, there's plenty of flexibility. You can configure your servers with anything from 1 to 180GB RAM, 1 to 16 CPU cores, and 1 to 8 individual disks with either fast SSD or cheaper archive storage.

If you're interested, Bytemark's free trial gives you seven days to find out more.

5. DigitalOcean

Hosting for the more demanding user

While cloud hosting schemes always involve pooling resources from multiple devices, most do their best to keep you away from the low-level details. You may be able to scale your plan by adding CPU cores, RAM or storage, for instance, but the console will present this to you as a single system.

DigitalOcean's Droplets are based around similar resizable and customizable virtual machines, but that's just the start – the technology has much more to offer.

For starters, the system supports Droplets of different types. If the standard plans aren't enough – priced from $5 (£3.55) a month for one core, 1GB RAM and 25GB storage – Optimized Droplets aim to ramp up your performance by using the best Broadwell and Skylake CPUs, and providing more RAM and storage space.

Individual Droplets have more features than you might expect, including performance monitoring and alerts, snapshots and automatic system-level backups.

There are various interesting ways to work with your Droplets as a group, including setting up a cloud firewall, and using a load balancer to distribute incoming traffic across your infrastructure.

DigitalOcean's transparent pricing is a highlight. You're billed hourly, with monthly caps, ensuring you only pay for the resources you use. Many of the features come for free – monitoring, cloud firewall – while others follow very simple pricing rules. Snapshots cost $0.05 per gigabyte per month, for instance, while backups are priced at 20% of the cost of the virtual machine – easy.

If all you want to do is host a scalable WordPress site, this will probably be overkill, but developers, sysadmins and other more demanding users will appreciate the power and flexibility DigitalOcean offers. Browse the lengthy list of tutorials (which numbers 1,987 at the time of writing) on the DigitalOcean site to find out more.

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