<span lang="EN-US">Increasing resource efficiency and reducing energy consumption are significant challenges in cloud environments. Placing virtual machines is essential in improving cloud systems’ performance. This paper presents a hybrid method using the artificial bee colony and imperialist competitive algorithm to reduce provider costs and decrease client expenditure. Implementation of the proposed plan in the CloudSim simulation environment indicates the proposed method performs better than the Monarch butterfly optimization and salp swarm algorithms regarding energy consumption and resource usage. Moreover, average central processing unit (CPU) and random-access memory (RAM) usage and the number of host shutdowns show better results for the proposed model.</span>