Cloud7 is pleased to announce the winners of the third edition of the Cloud7 Awards. After long deliberation, we managed to designate the winners of 10 different categories. Our picks had a successful year in providing the best solutions and improving the services they offer. Then, our audience decided on the winners by their votes.
The winners of the Cloud7 2022 Awards are:
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting plans are the most popular ones, and many small businesses go for this “entry-level” option when they decide to improve their online visibility by creating a website. Shared hosting does not give the best experience to the visitors; however, it is still better than nothing. There is a big competition in shared hosting; companies mostly offer freebies such as SSL, CDN, website builders, and more.
The Shared Hosting category winner is GoDaddy, one of the world’s most well-known web hosting service providers.
- 🥇GoDaddy
- 🥈NameCheap
- 🥉HostGator
- InMotion
- DreamHost
- A2 Hosting
- HostWinds
VPS Hosting
When things become serious, thanks to your online visibility with a shared hosting plan, you may need to upgrade the performance of your website. Virtual private server (VPS) hosting is a step ahead of shared hosting plans. You will get more consistent performance on your website, which will work as intended when multiple users visit. It is probably the best choice for small and medium-sized businesses.
The winner in the VPS Hosting category is Contabo, the VPS and dedicated server company from Germany, the previous year’s winner.
- 🥇Contabo
- 🥈DigitalOcean
- 🥉OVHcloud
- InMotion
- GoDaddy
- DreamHost
- Ionos by 1&1
Dedicated Hosting
Even though VPS hosting provides consistency in terms of performance, it is not the most reliable solution. Because, in fact, you are still sharing the hardware with someone else. Sharing the hardware can always end up causing inconsistency, so dedicated hosting is the best way to achieve a high-performance and reliable website. Reliability is especially important for e-commerce websites since visitors need to trust you when they use their credit cards on your website.
The winner in the Dedicated Hosting category is Hivelocity, the company that dedicated itself to dedicated hosting.
- 🥇Hivelocity
- 🥈Hetzner
- 🥉AccuWeb
- Gcore
- HostGator
- A2 Hosting
- InMotion
WordPress Hosting
WordPress hosting is one of the easiest ways to quickly launch a website by requiring a very little technical information, but still offering a huge amount of customization options, thanks to the WordPress infrastructure. There are many web hosting companies that offer specialized WordPress hosting solutions, and some of them are completely focused on this.
The winner in the WordPress Hosting category is Rocket.net, which completely dedicates itself to WordPress hosting.
- 🥇Rocket.net
- 🥈WP Engine
- 🥉Hostgator
- DreamHost
- Hostinger
- Bluehost
- Kinsta
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is becoming more and more popular every day. There are many different cloud services that cloud companies provide for specific workloads. Since there is a growing demand for the cloud, the tech giants compete to provide the most reliable cloud solutions. Every day we see tech giant planning, starting to build, or opening a data center for their cloud regions.
The winner in the Cloud Computing category is Amazon Web Services, which is not a surprise.
- 🥇Amazon Web Services
- 🥈OVHcloud
- 🥉Google Cloud Platform
- Microsoft Azure
- Oracle Cloud
- IBM Cloud (Kyndryl)
- Alibaba Cloud
Website Builder
Website builders enable non-programmer people quickly set up their websites. They generally have a couple of templates or themes as a base point; all you need to do is shape the website for your content. With those tools, you can easily customize up to a point without having any coding knowledge. That “point” makes the difference between the website builders since as you configure your website, you will have better ideas to use on it. The more the website builder you use allows you to deploy your ideas, the better they are.
The winner in the Website Builder category is WordPress, as expected, thanks to its flexibility and the huge plugin library.
- 🥇WordPress
- 🥈Wix
- 🥉Shopify
- Squarespace
- Bubble
- Weebly
- Webflow
Web Hosting Control Panel
You should care about many things while creating and deploying a website. Those actions can be done by directly connecting to the server. However, this would be very time-consuming and unsafe since handling such complicated configuration manually will most likely end up being “misconfiguration”. Thanks to the control panels, we don’t have to manually configure our hosting.
The winner in the Web Hosting Control Panel category is cPanel, the leader for many years.
- 🥇cPanel
- 🥈Plesk
- 🥉DirectAdmin
- Webmin
- ISPmanager
- hPanel
- Froxlor
Cloud Security
Security is becoming a more important aspect every day. We are seeing many companies suffer from hackers in many ways, and some of the smaller ones can even totally collapse with a ransomware attack. While currently, ransomware on the cloud is not a big issue, securing all digital systems and constantly observing possible threats should be the highest priority action.
The winner in the Cloud Security category is VMware, which offers many different services in the cloud.
- 🥇VMware
- 🥈CISCO
- 🥉Palo Alto Networks
- Fortinet
- Sophos
- Qualys
- Trend Micro
Data Center Provider
It’s been a year full of data center news popping up all around the world. In today’s technology, establishing a connection with low latency requires data centers to be closer to the target. This situation pushes companies to look for closer data centers to the location of their targets.
The Data Center Provider category winner is Equinix, the company where we published many articles about its new data centers.
- 🥇Equinix
- 🥈Digital Realty
- 🥉CyrusOne
- Coresite
- NTT Global
- Cyxtera Technologies
- China Telecom
Content Delivery Network
While using a hosting service with servers closer to the location of your target audience is the best way to establish a better connection, it is not always a possible solution, especially for smaller companies. However, CDNs take a heavy burden from your servers, especially the media, to deliver them to your target from the closest CDN location. CDN is a great way to improve the performance of your website or service at longer distances from the server’s location.
The winner in the Content Delivery Network category is Cloudflare; the CDN service if it suffers a problem, the whole internet will collapse.
- 🥇Cloudflare
- 🥈Akamai
- 🥉Fastly
- Sucuri
- Stackpath
- KeyCDN
- Gcore