Cloud Start
Small production sites
$17.95 /mo*
*Indicative example pricing
- 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM
- 80 GB replicated NVMe
- Auto-failover
- Daily snapshots
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In one paragraph
Cloud hosting runs your site across multiple connected servers rather than one machine. Storage, compute and networking are pooled, so a hardware failure moves your workload somewhere else instead of taking you offline, and a traffic spike draws on the cluster instead of exhausting a single box. You pay for that resilience, and you usually pay partly by usage.
How it differs from a single server
| Behaviour | Single server (shared or VPS) | Cloud cluster |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware failure | Site is down until restored | Workload restarts on another node |
| Traffic spike | Hits a hard ceiling | Draws from the pool, or auto-scales |
| Upgrading | Often a migration | Usually a slider and a reboot |
| Storage | Local disk | Replicated network storage |
| Billing | Flat monthly | Flat base plus usage, or hourly |
| Failure domain | One machine | One availability zone, sometimes one region |
Who benefits most
- Sites with seasonal or campaign-driven traffic — sales, launches, ticket releases
- Businesses where an hour of downtime is materially expensive
- Applications expected to grow quickly, where a migration would be disruptive
- Teams that want infrastructure-as-code, snapshots and repeatable environments
- Record archives that need geographic replication across regions
Where cloud hosting is oversold
A small brochure site on a resilient cloud cluster is still a small brochure site. If your traffic is flat and your uptime requirement is “please do not be down for a whole day”, cloud hosting buys you very little that a good shared plan with tested backups does not. Resilience is worth paying for when downtime has a price tag; otherwise it is an expensive comfort blanket.
Two questions cut through most cloud marketing: what is the failure domain (a node, a zone, a region?) and what is replicated synchronously (compute, storage, database, or only the file system?). Redundancy that stops at the disk layer will not save you from a zone outage.
Understanding the bill
Cloud pricing usually separates compute from storage from egress. Compute is predictable. Storage grows quietly. Egress — data leaving the platform — is the line that surprises people, especially for media-heavy sites and for record archives being exported in bulk. Before you migrate an archive in, check what it costs to get the whole thing out again; that number is also your exit cost.
Indicative pricing
Cloud Scale
Busy sites and stores
$49.95 /mo*
*Indicative example pricing
- 4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM
- 160 GB replicated NVMe
- Auto-scaling
- Multi-zone option
Cloud Archive
Long-term record storage
$0.021 /GB/mo*
*Indicative example pricing
- Object storage
- Versioning + object lock
- Cross-region replication
- Lifecycle rules
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Cloud hosting for regulated records
Cloud object storage with versioning and object lock is the closest thing most organisations will get to affordable write-once, read-many storage. Combined with lifecycle rules, it lets you set a retention period an administrator cannot shorten, which is exactly what a retention schedule asks for. Confirm that the lock is enforced at the platform level, that the region is contractually fixed, and that the provider will sign a data processing agreement naming it.
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