Cloudways Managed Hosting Review

Getting a presence online is one of the most important aspects of running your enterprise today. Everything from a daily blog, to an e-commerce company can be found online and when you talk about taking your business online, the first thing you need is a website. Initially, people start their blogs through connected domains with WordPress being at the forefront. However, when the time comes to monetize your business or blog, you need to go in for your own custom domain, and with that, comes the necessity to get yourself a hosting service. Cloudways is a great option for WordPress hosting, especially since it offers users a perfect balance between affordability and functionality. Gone are the days where you would find yourself clutching your head due to a slow loading WordPress site because this platform as a service contains a very versatile feature set that allows you to scale up the hosting resources as and when your website grows. The best part about Cloudways hosting is that they offer everyone a 30-day trial (affiliate link) to test out their platform, after which, if you are convinced, you can go for their paid full-time plans, the cheapest of which costs only $5 per month.

Cloudways offers its users what they like to call, a managed cloud hosting service for WordPress sites, where multiple copies of your content are replicated throughout your preferred data center. Basically, what this does is that in case your main server goes down, a copy of your website is served to form the next available server.

While this is really useful for those who thrive off their online presence, there are many other reasons for you to adopt Cloudways over traditional hosting services –

  1. Through Cloudways, your site is stored on multiple servers, while traditional hosting services store your site on a single server with just one additional backup.

  2. It is visibly faster than traditional hosting services. The server can detect your customers’ location and transmit content to them through the server that is nearest to them.

  3. Cloud hosting uses SSD drives to improve your site’s performance.

  4. Cloudways uses a wide range fo security techniques to process your WordPress site.

  5. Cloudways servers are very easy to scale. This is good news if your business site sees a sudden spike in incoming traffic.

  6. Cloudways offers a pay-as-you-go pricing scheme which offers you more control over your plan and the way you use the Cloudways hosting service.

  7. SSD based Hosting keeps your site fast and super responsive.

Cloudways provides a variety of processing power, memory, storage space and bandwidth, depending on the plan you choose to go for. At a bare minimum, Cloudways offers your 512MB RAM, 20GB of storage, 1 Core Processor and 1TB Bandwidth.

What more does Cloudways offer?
  1. Cloudways takes care of your site migration if you choose to move hosts.
  2. Single click setup for new sites.
  3. Let’s Encrypt SSL is built-in and communicates between your site and your customers.
  4. Two-factor authentication offers protection against cyber attacks.
  5. 24/7 tech support.
  6. A dedicated firewall adds an extra layer of protection around your site.
  7. The Cloudways CDN gives your online store a speed boost.
So, what happens once you decide to go for Cloudways?

Users get access to a unique control panel that lets you configure your server. But first, you have to choose your preferred server and in this case, Cloudways gets you spoilt for choice with a selection of the most prominent servers namely –

1. Digital Ocean

2. Vultr

3. Google Compute Engine

4. Amazon Web Services

5. Linode

All of the aforementioned cloud providers are top of the line and also the most sought after anywhere in the world.

Once you have selected your server, you can start to configure it. The Cloudways control panel is superbly intuitive and lets you set the smallest of details with a click of a button. For example, a slider lets you select the number of page views that you are anticipating every month and Cloudways records this information and automatically recommends a server size that will be ideal for your needs. However, you also have the option to set the server specifications manually. Once you have set this up, Cloudways will. Ask you to select your server location.

Once you have set up your cloud server, you can then install WordPress from the application management section. You can choose from among Standard, Multi-Site, and WooCommerce Hosting, depending on your requirement.

The Cloudways Console can also be used for the following applications aside from server setup –
  1. Security – This feature keeps a log of the whitelisted IP addresses that you use to gain access to your server.

  2. Backups – You can set automatic backups of your cloud server images. This can be done daily, every two days or so forth depending on your preference. You can manually backup your server anytime with just a click of a button.

  3. Monitoring – The best feature by far of the Cloudways hosting service is this one. Using a simple drop-down, you can monitor the traffic on your site and also keep a check on the load on your server due to incoming traffic.

  4. Easily Handle Traffic Surges – This feature comes in handy when you face a sudden surge in traffic. It can get very embarrassing when your site crashes due to a sudden surge in traffic, but with the vertical scaling option, you can now scale up your server resources in order to handle this sudden surge in traffic. Cloudways offers a pay-as-you-go scheme where you only have to pay for increased server resources for as long as you require.

When it comes to supporting E-Commerce platforms, Cloudways supports a number of them including Magento, WooCommerce, and Prestashop, which you can use to sell your goods and services online.

Coming to the Performance and Uptime, Cloudways has partnered with some of the top cloud providers in the industry in order to maintain close to 99% uptime when hosting your website on their WordPress cloud servers.

In addition to all this, you also have the option to use the StackPath CDN, which uses a global network of 45 PoPs. The data center nodes store copies of your website, and when someone visits your site, the system automatically detects their geographical location and delivers your site from the network node closest to them. This ensures that your site load times are kept to a minimum and in effect increases your brand credibility in front of potential customers.

Overall, Cloudways is in every possible way, one of, if not the best Cloud-based hosting service in the market at the moment. Yes, the Platform as a service approach means that you have to use their dedicated console to manage applications, but they have made it so user-friendly, that you will be up and running within no time at all. WordPress is obviously the biggest hosting service there is and combined with Cloudways, it’s about to get even bigger.