Ask HN: Best cloud host?

I have had a great experience with <a href="https://www.stormondemand.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.stormondemand.com/</a> so far. They offer both shared and bare-metal dedicated and they always seem to be cheap compared to others. They were rated quite high by the cloudharmony benchmarks. Not to mention their support twitter account, when needed, are really responsive.

I tend to use heroku's free plan for testing out ideas. I wrote a post detailing how here: <a href="http://rawsyntax.com/post/8737142015/host-your-side-project-for-free" rel="nofollow">http://rawsyntax.com/post/8737142015/host-your-side-project-...</a>

App Engine has a real solid infrastructure. I find it that it's extremely good at hiding implementation details - I don't care whether my database is Mongo or MySQL, I just want it to work and scale. The APIs never break and it's really cheap.

You need to define your interpretation of "cloud host". It varies a lot. Are you looking for a virtual machine host with a decent API? Or are you looking for someone to manage the stack of your software? In which case, what is your stack?

We've been using dotcloud (<a href="https://www.dotcloud.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dotcloud.com/</a>) and are quite happy with the results in testing. Haven't gone to production yet though so we'll see how they pan out in the long run.

It should be noted that many of the services that have been mentioned (heroku, dotcloud) are built on top of AWS, so they'll be no more reliable than AWS.<p>Other big players in the cloud space are MS Azure and Rackspace.

Trying out ep.io now. Docs are lacking a bit, but support seems superb. Ask again or contact me in a few weeks, I should have more to say then.

If project is written in Ruby, take a look at Engine Yard and Heroku (it also supports node.js, Clojure and Java).

We've been trying out pagodabox and love it. (PHP)