Cloud hosting has become a popular option for hosting websites and web apps. In contrast to other hosting options (shared, VPS, and dedicated), cloud hosting offers significant benefits in terms of reliability and dependability of the hosting solution.
In many cases, cloud hosting is ideal for eCommerce and high-traffic websites. Unlike shared hosting, cloud hosting ensures that the website or the app receives the full complement of the hosting solution’s resources. Similarly, unlike VPS or dedicated hosting solutions, cloud hosting is often simpler and less costly. In practical terms, cloud hosting solutions could be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection.
An Introduction to Cloudways
Cloudways is a top-of-the-line cloud hosting platform for freelancers, designers, developers, eCommerce stores, and digital agencies. It offers easy-to-deploy and reliable cloud infrastructures to small and medium-sized businesses with the option to choose from 45+ global data centers, including the continental US. Also, it offers 1-click PHP MySQL hosting for unlimited websites (including WordPress and other PHP-based apps) on its top-notch cloud server providers.
Cloudways is a cloud hosting company with a centralized platform for managing external cloud services like DigitalOcean, VULTR, Amazon, and Google Cloud. Cloudways is more like a hub of cloud services than a hosting company.
Their goal has always been to provide PHP wordpress and Magento conveniently and easily. Indeed, it is the main slogan of their outstanding cloud services. They are known for managing your cloud hosting account, and their blog and social media accounts are full of interviews with industry leaders, website development tips, and how-to guides.
Scalable, Easy To Use & Reasonably Priced Cloud Hosting
Unlike regular hosting, where you have a specific “space” on an actual physical server, with cloud hosting, your website is hosted on a virtual partition of a big network of servers (the cloud). This approach gives you a great deal of flexibility in managing your site. Because everything is virtual, you can quickly add or remove resources as needed, and deploying a new website takes just a few minutes.
Cloudways doesn’t run its cloud hosting network, though. Instead, it connects you with cloud hosting from some of the biggest names. Currently, you can choose from:
- Vultr
- Google Cloud Platform
- DigitalOcean
- Amazon Web Services
- Linode
So, creating your customized virtual server is straightforward: you choose a provider and a core app, then build your web app.
Powerful Cloudways ThunderStack
The software infrastructure built on Cloudways is “Thunderstick.” It comprises the Nginx and Apache web servers, MySQL, MariaDB, PHP 7, and several caching kinds. All applications use Thunderstick. The operating system is Debian Linux.
Security measures include platform-level firewalls on each server and continuous monitoring. Two-factor authentication is available and recommended. API keys based on OAuth restrict access to the Cloudways API.
The Platform has all the the features you need to up and run the best PHP cloud hosting. You have built-in features like:
- Composer
- Git
- Cron Jobs
- Remote Database Connections
- Custom Mysql Manager
- Queues for PHP and Laravel Applications
- Staging Environment
- One-Click Github Deployment.
- Server/App Management.
- One-Click Migrations
Speed Optimization On the Go
Cloudways provides you with dedicated resources to enhance website optimization and performance speed. Cloudways is much more than that, as its Platform is integrated with many other performance-optimizing tools like PHP7, Memcached, Varnish, Nginx, Redis, and HTTP/2. As a layperson, you don’t need to configure these features manually on your web apps if you are using managed cloud hosting of Cloudways; they have deployed automatically into your application once you have launched it. However, in the later stage, you could customize these features according to your preference.
While Cloudways is not just only a platform that offers low-level technical features; instead, you get automated installations of some of the known CMS in the market, including WordPress, Magento, Joomla, Drupal, OpenCart, PrestaShop, Moodle, Laravel, and many others.
Cloudways Features You Need
When looking for managed WordPress hosting, you’ll undoubtedly come across many companies that offer similar services. While most web hosts offer supervised WordPress hosting on a shared, VPS, or dedicated server environment, one company has truly stepped out of the norm and provided a unique managed-to-host solution. That company is Cloudways, which has made its name top among the others on the list.
Cloudways offers managed cloud hosting services for different web apps on a cloud server where multiple copies of your content will be replicated throughout your chosen data center. A complex algorithm handles data switching, and if your main server goes down, a copy of your website is served from the next available server.
Namely, some of the top features of Cloudways are listed on the site. You can read all and see colorways have covered you with every needed part.
One-Click App/Server Install
The Cloudways E-commerce Cloud Hosting platform lets customers set up online stores. They get one free migration from their previous site. Alternatively, they can build an e-commerce site on supported CMSs.
The Cloud Console makes management very convenient, with features like one-click SSL certificate management and domain mapping. Operations that might otherwise require a support call are easy to carry out.
Backups and CloudwaysBot
Backups run daily by default, and recovery is a one-click operation. The account owner can change the backup schedule using the console. You can create server and application backups with a click on it. Also, you can enable backups by default.
The CloudwaysBot is an intelligent personal assistant that provides notifications about server status, backups, and upgrades and offers tips and recommendations.
Developers can access the bot with a custom API. It can answer any support questions. Customers can get their messages from several venues, including Slack, email, and HipChat, and they can select the types of notifications they want to receive.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Cloudways has an easy-to-integrate content delivery network (CDN), called CloudwaysCDN, at a low cost. The CDN is based on StackPath (formerly MaxCDN).
Cloudways CDN is the recent addition to the toolkit to help you further optimize your application. It provides CDN integration in partnership with StackPath. With CDN available on Cloudways, you get free from the hassle of paying at separate places. Get your CDN add-on, and the bill will be added to the invoice.
Sites hosted on the providers that Cloudways support run pretty quickly, but adding a CDN adds more speed and reliability.
Adding Cloudways CDN to your application is just a couple of clicks away. In your application dashboard, navigate to Cloudways CDN to enable the CDN. In this section, enter the domain name of the site where you want to help the CDN. Click Create, and you are good to go.
Staging and Command-Line Access
A built-in staging mechanism lets developers move new code to a test environment. The default installation subdomain is preconfigured for staging and testing code. Developers can create additional staging areas as needed so new versions are confirmed before going out to the public.
Command-line access by SSH is available to the developers, but they can’t have root access for security reasons. In many cases, this is said to be a great feature to retain the Platform’s security mechanisms.
Smooth Vertical Scaling
With vertical scaling, you can adjust allocated server resources at any time. This is a brilliant feature when experiencing a traffic surge. If you’re scaling for a short period, Cloudways offers a “Pay as you go” system so that you don’t have to pay for server resources you won’t need later on.
This feature brings the website owners the ease of scalability for their applications at any stage. They must monitor the increase of traffic on their apps and, when finding it more than adequate, must scale the app’s storage to a much larger size.
Multiple Data Centers
With more than 40 data centers worldwide, Cloudways ensures you do not have to worry about downtime. Also, you could host your website closest to the target audience, minimizing page load time.
So, the above feature also ensures data redundancy and always ensures that the backup of valuable information remains in different data centers.
Free Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates
Customers can install free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates through the user interface.
Alternatively, they can obtain their certificates and install them on their sites.
Other than those working only with their PHP applications, most customers will require additional infrastructure from one of the third-party services. They can use as many services as they want from one account.
Platform Level Firewalls
At Cloudways, all servers are protected with platform-level firewalls, ensuring applications’ persistent security. These platform-level firewalls detect and block all unwanted connections and secure the applications from forged hacking attempts.
24/7 Live Customer Support
CloudWays has speedy chat support, which only takes seconds to reply from their support agent. Other than chat support, CloudWays also has a Phone call, email, and ticket system to make it easier for the customer.
Customers can get support through Live Chat or by submitting report tickets.
They can also query CloudwaysBot for help. Support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Plans & Pricing
Cloudways is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and you can choose to host your website on a cloud server from DigitalOcean, Vultr, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud Platform.
Below is an overview of their plans (using DigitalOcean’s cloud servers) and the current price list. For the latest and most up-to-date prices, visit the Cloudways website.
Final Thoughts
Cloudways is one of the few companies offering a great balance between affordability and functionality for cloud-based managed PHP and WordPress hosting. Their cloud servers have a fantastic feature set, and you can scale hosting resources as your website grows. If you’re still on the fence about hosting your website on a cloud server, sign up for the 30-day free trial Cloudways offers to test its Platform.
