Alternative clouds are having a moment. Nearly 75% of organizations are using two or more alternative cloud providers, according to a HostingAdvice.com survey of 500 IT leaders from May 2025. These alternative clouds refer to cloud providers outside the major hyperscalers, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, or IBM Cloud.
“You’re able to get enterprise-grade hosting from alternative cloud providers,” says Joe Warnimont, senior analyst at HostingAdvice.com. While hyperscalers still dominate in market share, alternative clouds are closing the functionality gap while delivering high availability and lower pricing.
Beyond cost, these newer cloud providers emphasize niche strengths. For example, Warnimont points to Vultr for edge computing and DigitalOcean for application development. Other examples of alternative clouds include Akamai Cloud (formerly Linode), Cloudflare, CloudJiffy, CoreWeave, Fly.io, IONOS, Lambda, NetExplorer, OVHcloud, Paperspace, Railway, Render, Scaleway, and Wasabi.
