Ballou is a Swedish cloud hosting company that started out in 2007. This still relatively small company provides a range of cloud solutions – from private cloud to VPS to hybrid cloud solutions – for small to large businesses. It is focused on a Swedish customer base and publishes its website only in Swedish (although you can use its control panel in English and Dutch too).
Features and Ease of Use
Ballou provides all the features you need to tailor the right cloud server for you, including:
- Domain registration
- Purchasable SSL certificates
- Purchasable automatic backups with backup storage as an extra
- Up to 200 GB of SSD storage
- At least 720 GB of free bandwidth
Ballou’s very flexible cloud hosting product can be customized to suit your needs. You can adjust the amount of storage, bandwidth, memory, backup storage, the number of IP addresses, and the CPU cores you need. You can configure quite a powerful server with up to 200 GB SSD storage, 20 GB RAM, 24 CPU cores, and 3000 TB of traffic (plus 720 GB free). You can also scale the solution up or down as your needs change.
Ballou also provides a load-balancing tool that you can use to optimize your server’s performance.
A CDN and SSL certificates are also provided as paid extras. With the CDN, you can decide on the required bandwidth for different regions. As for the SSL certificate, you can choose one that is most suitable for your organization.
The easy-to-use custom control panel allows you to manage your hosting. Although its no cPanel, it does the job it’s designed to do.
Pricing and Support
Ballou provides five straightforward and affordable preconfigured VPS servers with prices in the mid to high range. Unfortunately, there are no free trials and no money-back guarantees to test the services before you fully commit.
It’s also disappointing that there are no free domains, no free SSL certificates, and no free backups. However, you do get decent storage and bandwidth for the high price you pay, plus free DNS management.
The cloud hosting lets you configure the resources you need. Although the prices look high for the company’s recommended configurations, the fact that you can be billed hourly means that you only pay for what you use. In all other cases, you have to contact the company for a custom quote.
Unfortunately, with Ballou, there are no guarantees and no 24/7 support. You should get a relatively rapid response during weekday working hours, but not outside of office hours or on the weekends. I’ve also experienced problems getting my support tickets answered, with some seemingly falling through the cracks altogether. However, phone support is also provided, and the pretty good knowledge base should answer many of your questions:
