The 6 best PHP cloud hosting providers for 2024

Benjamin Crozat

Published on Jan 24, 2024

Introduction to PHP hosting

The internet is full of people ready to use your PHP applications.

Whether you are a company, a fresh new startup, a freelancer, or a young developer, choosing the right cloud hosting provider for PHP is crucial in order to scale.

If you are in a hurry, here’s my recommendation: DigitalOcean (for the VPS) combined with Ploi (for managing the VPS) are what I use for this blog. As a second choice, I would go for Cloudways, which is a fully managed solution.

Available discounts

Before you continue, know that there are great discounts and bonuses available for some of the providers I recommend in this article:

• DigitalOcean: Get $200 worth of credit for free.
• Ploi: test it for as long as you want with their free plan.
• Cloudways: use the “CROZAT” promo code for 10% off for 3 months.
• Vultr: Get $100 worth of credit for free.

The best PHP cloud hosting providers by price

At first glance, some providers seem really cheap.

But this is because they let you manage your server.

On the contrary, some providers look more expensive, but they take care of a lot of things for you, which lets you invest time and energy is other tasks.

So my recommendation is to think for the long run before choosing.

The best PHP cloud hosting providers

Cloudways

Cloudways is a very good alternative to Ploi. I really like this one. Unlike others, it’s a fully managed solution. This means you don’t have to worry about creating an account with a cloud provider.

The particularity of Cloudways is that you will be able to tap into hardware from DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform all at once if you want to. Therefore, you can make sure to serve your users no matter where they are in the world (because the global availability from all providers is combined).

And for the businesses that go all in on content marketing, they even offer a fully managed WordPress hosting solution (meaning they handle everything from security to workload thanks to Kubernetes) that autoscales depending on your traffic.

There’s not much to add about Cloudways. It’s a good one and you should definitely give it a try.

Oh, by the way, I managed to negociate a promo code for you. Use “CROZAT” and get 10% for 3 months! 👀

Try Cloudways

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean has been a fantastic companion for me when combined with Ploi.

Its droplets, which are essentially Linux-based virtual machines, are full-featured and can be set up in seconds.

This makes it incredibly easy and efficient to manage my cloud infrastructure as I can interact with my droplets via an intuitive UI.

Additionally, the predictable monthly pricing and 99.99% uptime SLA give me peace of mind as I don’t have to worry about unexpected costs or downtime.

They offer multiple hardware options like Premium CPU-Optimized, Memory-Optimized, and Storage-Optimized droplets. I can choose the right plan based on my workload and the demands of the applications I’m working on. Plus, the free outbound data transfer, monitoring, and firewalls make it a very cost-effective solution and I don’t have to set this up myself (actually, I don’t want to set this up, EVER, haha).

And finnaly, the team management feature has been invaluable for collaborating on projects while keeping everything secure (clients just revoked my access once I was done).

There’s not much to add about DigitalOcean. I’ve been a happy customer for around 10 years already.

Try DigitalOcean

Ploi

Ploi is a server manager that drastically cut cost for the average person and small businesses. It’s easy to use and in some areas, it even does better than Laravel Forge, which is a similar product. They provide every feature any serious PHP app needs: one-click server creation and provisionning, push to deploy, load balancing, free SSL certificates, etc. And all of this behind a very easy to use user interface. That’s one big advantage over Cloudways for instance.

Currently, Ploi is the service I use to manage the DigitalOcean Droplet (VPS) of this blog. I don’t have a lot of negative things to say about it, it just works!

Try Ploi

Vultr

From what I can see at the time I’m writing this, Vultr offers slightly more resources for a lesser price compared to DigitalOcean. And it’s not because they’re using cheaper hardware. Nope, they also offer premium AMD and Intel CPUs and NVMe SSDs for storage.

Also, another big win is that Vultr offers 32 global locations, compared to 15 for DigitalOcean. So if your app serves a wordlwide audience, you can be assured that you will be able to spawn a server close to them and reduce latency.

Although I’m not using Vultr anymore, I also appreciated its user-friendly control panel. It was a great experience using it, as it offered flexibility, performance, and ease of management essential for any developer who don’t want to waste more time than necessary.

Try Vultr

HostGator

The VPS hosting plans of HostGator are incredibly flexible and come with a full suite of features that developers, like myself, find very useful. Also, by default, they offer VPS hosting with way more resources than DigitalOcean and Vultr.

The full root access allowed me to install any necessary software and the unrestricted access to create unlimited email addresses, databases, and FTP accounts made it a breeze to manage my projects. Plus, the weekly off-site backups can be life saving. (So if the datacenter where your VPS is burns down, your backups are safe!)

While I’ve moved on to other solutions that better fit my current needs, I can definitely vouch for the reliability and performance of HostGator’s VPS hosting, especially when used alongside Ploi for instance.

Go for it if you want, it’s a reliable solution. And it’s hard not to love their incredibly cute logo, don’t you think?

Try HostGator

What makes a good cloud hosting provider?

Reliability is critical. In my opinion, a good host should be able to deliver the best service with minimal downtime. When your website is reachable, you avoid losing customers to your competitors. Aim for hosts that have at least a 99.9% uptime rate. Such a rate means your website can potentially be down for an hour per year, which is acceptable.

• Speed is also important. A good host must provide fast loading times, which is essential for a better user experience and SEO (Google requires your website to load in under 2 seconds). But what makes a fast server?
• Location. The closer your server is to your visitors, the faster your website will load. If your server is in the US and your visitors are in Europe, the loading time will be longer. Of course, when you have an international audience, you should set up load balancers to dispatch your traffic all over the world, and tapping into multiple hosts depending on the locations they provide is perfectly fine;
• Network bandwidth. The more bandwidth your server has, the faster your website will load. You can manage on servers with 100Mbps bandwidth, given moderate traffic. But if cost is not an issue, go for at least 1Gbps; 👍
• Hardware. The more powerful your server is (CPU, RAM and SSD storage), the faster your website will load.

Which database is best for PHP?

PHP supports a lot of databases such as:

• MariaDB 10.3+
• MySQL 5.7+
• PostgreSQL 10.0+
• SQLite 3.8.8+
• SQL Server 2017+

Your choice will depend on the specificities of your project. Each database has its pros and cons.

Every hosting provider I recommend in this article supports them.

You can either:

• Install the database on the VPS or dedicated server you chose
• Create a managed database that is vertically and horizontally scalable with a few clicks

Free PHP hosting: is it possible?

Unfortunately, it seems there are no worthy free way to host a PHP application.

Remember: if something that costs money to a company is free, it means that YOU are the product.

However, if you are ready to make compromises, you could host static websites (meaning it’s just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) for free on these awesome services:

• Cloudflare pages
• Deta.sh
• DigitalOcean App Platform
• Fly.io
• GitHub Pages
• GitLab Pages
• Google Firebase Hosting
• Netlify
• Railway
• Render
• Surge
• Vercel