Editor's opinion
Lorienz Galarpe
I am a website designer and developer for over 7 years now, and I worked with several hosting companies in the past for each website project I handle.
First impression
Alibaba Cloud, previously known as Aliyun, is a Chinese web hosting provider that specializes in cloud computing and it has been in the business since 2009. They exist as a branch of Alibaba Group and are headquartered in Singapore, and have data centers in over 20 regions and more than 60 availability zones around the world. At present, they claim to have more data centers and CDN nodes in Asia-Pacific region than any other cloud service provider. Likewise, they take great pride in having over three million customers at this time and in more than 300 countries and regions, thanks to their countless cross-industry solutions. In addition, they consider themselves to be the number one in China, Asia-Pacific and the third best cloud hosting provider in the world.
Their main website is in English by default, but it is available in multiple languages as well, among them, as expected, Mandarin and a few other Chinese dialects, followed by German, French, Central Thai, Indonesian and Vietnamese. Although the site may seem a bit overwhelming at first, we had no trouble navigating around and finding all the relevant information. Locations of all their data centers, inside and outside mainland China, are marked on the map, as well as the locations of all of their global offices.
The interface of Alibaba Cloud console seems quite intimidating at first, since it is designed to provide professional users with easy access to all of Alibaba Cloud's numerous services. After clicking on a web hosting icon under the “Domains & Websites” section, you can choose to purchase a hosting plan and everything will begin to clear up for you. There is no one-click installer, so if you want WordPress or Joomla, you’ll probably need to consult a how-to support page, because trial-and-error methods could take a while.
Trial period
If you are an individual and not a company, you’ll be getting a free trial of considerable worth including a 12-month trial of flexible compute service with one core 1GB memory and over 40 different related products. Further identity verification is required to be done via mobile phone.
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As for the payment method, they accept credit/debit cards, PayPal, Paytm (exclusively for the Indian customers) and Alipay (for the Chinese customers), which you’re probably familiar with if you’ve been ordering stuff from China over the past few years.
Billing cycle
Alibaba Cloud offers a wide and diverse range of enterprise-level cloud-related services such as elastic computing, relational databases, big-data processing, storage hosting, content delivery networks, anti-DDoS protection, domain solutions and more.
All cloud services are available on a pay-as-you-go basis and the pricing system is transparent and rather simple, which is refreshing to see. Pay as you go means you’ll only have to pay for the server accumulation and depends on server power you require.
Control panel
Alibaba Cloud uses a non-standard cPanel which doesn’t provide a user-friendly approach for the less tech-savvy users. Additionally, there is no website builder nor anything analogous to cPanel's file manager and installing additional applications will require you to upload files via FTP, enter the required information to enable a quick connection and expand files to a folder of your choice upon the confirmation. If all of it sounds unnecessarily complicated and a bit intimidating, it's because it really is, but on the bright side, every step of the process has a fitting guide to provide a helping hand.
Limits
Alibaba Cloud offers a dynamic asset known as Light Space for users that need a lightweight turn-key virtual private server (VPS). Starting from $19.90 for the first year, this affordable VPS solution from Alibaba Cloud is an isolated cloud server that contains a cost-effective SSD powered by 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and includes multiple types of data transfer plans.
You can build Light Space in 11 Alibaba Cloud regions available worldwide, including US West (Silicon Valley), US East (Virginia), Australia (Sydney), Germany (Frankfurt), China (Hong Kong), Singapore, Indonesia (Jakarta), Japan (Tokyo), Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur), India (Mumbai), and UK (London). The product will be deployed in other regions in the future.
Light Space is also connected to a wide array of popular app images, such as WordPress, LAMP, Docker, Drupal, Node.js, Joomla, Ghost, OpenCart, Plesk, and cPanel, as well as OS images, including OpenSUSE, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, and Alibaba Cloud Linux. You can also select your custom image.
Limits depend on CPU, Memory RAM, SSD Storage, and Bandwidth you want to choose for your projects.
Security
A comprehensive DDoS protection for enterprises to intelligently defend sophisticated DDoS attacks, reduce business loss risks, and mitigate potential security threats.
Anti-DDoS service is based on Alibaba Cloud's global scrubbing centers, combined with intelligent DDoS detection and protection systems developed at Alibaba, automatically mitigates attacks and reinforce the security of your applications, reducing the threat of malicious attacks.
As the DDoS protection system for Alibaba Group, Alibaba Cloud Anti-DDoS products have been deployed to scrubbing centers across the globe, serving as a secure network with over 10 Tbit/s total mitigation capacity. Alibaba Cloud Anti-DDoS mitigates around 2,500 DDoS attacks on a daily basis and succeeded in protecting against a DDoS attack of 1 Tbit/s.
OS
Alibaba Cloud Linux is a free-to-use, native operating system that provides a stable, reliable, and high-performance environment for your applications.
Alibaba Cloud Linux is a next-generation Linux distribution released by Alibaba Cloud. It includes advanced features developed by the Linux community, and provides a stable and reliable environment for applications running on the cloud. Alibaba Cloud Linux is deeply optimized based on the Alibaba Cloud infrastructure to provide the best experience for users. You can install Alibaba Cloud Linux on all types of Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, including ECS Bare Metal Instances.
Support
When support is concerned, Alibaba Cloud offers various types of self-service as well as assistance via live chat, ticket system and toll-free telephone.
In addition to the recently created yet decent knowledgebase, they provide a document center, a blog, a helpful FAQ section, forum and quite detailed step-by-step tutorials, all with pictures. These tutorials are divided into groups by different sections, such as “For New Users”, “Website Deployment”, “App Development” and more, which demonstrates a very user-friendly approach.
In addition, they’ve recently created a so-called “Video Center” with a variety of self-promotional videos. More importantly, it also features numerous video tutorials and demos covering the most relevant topics.
Conclusion
Pros |
Cons |
- Several data centers to choose from;
- There is a free trial for new users;
- Flexible billing options to meet everyone’s needs.
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- No one-click installation;
- Not suitable for all user type.
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Although Alibaba Cloud provides a myriad of enterprise-level cloud-based products and technologies, and offers a range of quality services to most businesses, their web hosting plans are somewhat limited, and more so in comparison with a number of competitors. The services they do offer are first-rate and prices are budget-friendly.
FAQ:
✴️What is the New User Offer and how can I get it? Is it free?
The New User Offer learning path is totally free and you will be able to collect Clouder badges and certifications and get yourself a free ACA Cloud Certification exam opportunity. Purchase the Clouder Operate and Manage a Cloud Server , and get the Clouder with $ 0.00 as a new user. After purchase(with no cost), you will receive the free new user Clouder Package redeem code in a week. The package includes 10+ products of Alibaba Cloud. Follow the instructions on the email to redeem the FREE Clouder Package. Pass 3 of the Clouder exams in the Clouder Package in ONE month, and apply for the FREE ACA Associate Cloud Computing Certification Exam. After submitting, you will receive a confirmation email with ACA exam vouchers and instructions.
❔What's Alibaba Cloud’s responsibility for the security of the cloud environment?
Alibaba Cloud must ensure a securely managed and operated infrastructure, including (but not limited to) data centers deployed across regions and zones, Alibaba backbone networks, and physical devices, including computing, storage, and network devices, and Apsara, the underlying distributed cloud OS that runs on Alibaba Cloud, along with all of the various cloud services and products running on top of Apsara OS. At the same time, Alibaba Cloud is also responsible for identity and access control management as well as the monitoring and operation systems on the platform side to provide customers with a highly available and highly secure cloud service platform. Consider Alibaba Cloud's computing service, Elastic Compute Service (ECS), as an example. The underlying physical, hardware, and virtualization security capabilities of ECS services are provided directly by Alibaba Cloud.
✅What are the customers' controls over their member content (customer data)?
As a customer, you control your member content. You control the lifecycle of your member content on Alibaba Cloud, including the creation, usage, storage period, and destruction of data. You determine where your member content will be stored, including the type of storage and the geographic region. You choose the secured state of your member content. They offer customers strong encryption for member content in transit and at rest, and they provide you with the option to manage your own encryption keys. You manage access to your member content, and access to Alibaba Cloud services and resources through users, groups, permissions, and credentials that you control.