Are you tired of the hassles that come with hosting your website? Well, not anymore. Cloudways will act as an intermediary and make your digital life much easier.
What is Cloudways Hosting?
To put it in perspective, cloudways itself is not hosting, but offers you the ability to sit back and relax while it does all the work of maintaining and keeping your website up and running through a number of popular hosting providers, including but not limited to Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and Digital Ocean. It is a platform that builds on top of existing infrastructure. Its services come at a cost, but they are certainly worth it.
How can you make your website live with Cloudways?
Cloudways is pretty easy to use, but there is a slight learning curve. But don't worry, anyone can learn and understand how it works in no time by simply playing around with the dashboard.
First steps - free trial version
First and foremost, feature that makes it stand out is a three-day trial period offered by them as you open their website. You can sign up via LinkedIn, Google or GitHub, which is a great feature. You don't have to pay an upfront amount to take advantage of the offer.
Content management system and server selection
After logging in, you have to choose a CMS from a variety of options, all of which are very popular. You can choose depending on what you feel comfortable with. These include:
- WordPress
- Drupal
- Joomla
- Magento
- Coke
- Prestashop
- PHP stack
You will use any of these systems to create your amazing websites.
Once you have selected your platform, you will now be presented with the hosting provider options. You will need to choose from the following five hosting provider companies on which your websites will go live.
- Google Cloud Platform
- Amazon Web Services
- Digital ocean
- Vultr
- Linode
Then you need to choose from one of the many server locations across the country. Cloudways has more than 25 data centers around the world (if you add up those of the hosting providers), such a luxury is not offered by any other hosting provider. This is something you can make good use of if you want to reach an audience from specific locations.
Create your website
Cloudways is famous for its WordPress site management. Create your website from scratch with great customizability. Simply log in with your credentials and choose a theme, change the pages to your liking, add images and kudos, and your website is ready.
On your dashboard, you can manage all applications that are hosted using analytics and logs.
What does Cloudways have that others don't?
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with hosting service providers if you want to host a website exclusively with them, but they can get a bit too technical for people who don't want to delve deep into HTML and the like. All they care about is a good, responsive, running website and those are exactly the people Cloudways caters to.
So let's explore what Cloudways actually does for these people.
Server response time
The response time of the server is really very low and is just under 25 ms in the country in which the server was selected. It can increase if the user is not in the same country, but the increase is negligible.
Website speed
As with the response time, the speed of the website is commendable at just under 1 second. That's a lightning-fast speed that not even Sitegroud or A2 Hosting offer. The average speed may be lower for people living in countries far away from yours, but this problem is solved by using a CDN.
A little background for those who may not know; a CDN is a distributed network of servers designed to load your websites as quickly as possible. A CDN distributes parts of your web pages, such as images or Java scripts, to servers closer to your customers so that their web pages can load efficiently and in less time. A fast website means satisfied visitors and a higher number of customers who buy your product.
Cloudways offers CDN separately, so alongside the basic plans. Even then, it's great value for money as they only charge $1 for 25 GBs.
Stress tests
Websites hosted via Cloudways are known to withstand heavy load tests. Even with increasing user numbers and many requests, no significant increase in server response time has been observed. Since they are very stable, their response time is like the icing on an already delicious cake.
Downtime & operating time
Cloud hosting means that your website is stored on different servers. Since it exists on more than one server, the chances of your website crashing are very low. This is exactly why Cloudways is known for offering 99.999 % uptime. The website stays live for as long as you want it to. No downtime makes everyone really attracted to their services.
Handling heavy goods traffic
Cloudways is famous for handling high traffic on your website. They use dedicated servers and depending on the plan you have chosen, they manage the traffic and keep your website running smoothly so that your website's response time is not affected. How do they achieve this, you ask? Well, the answer to that is both a positive and a negative aspect of cloudways.
Cloudways does not use C-Panel. C-Panel is resource intensive, so the lack of C-Panel at Cloudways allows resources to be used for handling traffic. They also do not offer email hosting. Now this is an actual feature of cloudways that is considered bad.
However, they use the resources that come with email hosting for traffic handling, and this way they handle high traffic without increasing server load times with high traffic. So, if I had the option, I would do the same 99 times out of 100.
Breeze" cache plug-in
Cloudways offers a free plugin called 'Breeze'. For fast data retrieval, this plugin can optimize the visitor experience so that user interaction is far better than you would otherwise find on the internet.
Offsite backups
Offsite backups are very important in the event of a mishap. Even if different clones of your websites are available on different servers and in case one server goes down, a copy is made live on another server so that your website has minimal downtime, offsite backup is still very important in case of catastrophic failures.
Cloudways also offers this service, but charges for it separately.
24/7 live support
Cloudways offers 24-hour live chat support where you can communicate any issue that arises. When you start a conversation with them, you must first speak to a bot and submit your problem. If the chat bot cannot solve your problem, you will be redirected to a human agent. However, the chat support is very cooperative and as a result, your issues will be resolved in no time.
Number of inodes
Since cloudways does not use a C-Panel, a correct inode count is not available. But due to the fact that Cloudways gives you full access and control, you can use the terminal and find out the inode count. In Digital Ocean's base plan, the inode count was found to be around 1.6 million, compared to 300-600 thousand for other shared hosting providers.
Staging
Staging means that you have created a WordPress website and now want to make certain changes to your website after it has gone live. To do this, you clone your website in the backend and make the desired changes to this clone. Note that these changes will not yet be applied to your live website.
After you have modified the cloned website to your liking, you want to apply these changes to your live site. This is staging and cloudways offers this whole process at the cost of a single mouse click.
All of these features are offered on very high-end hostings like Kinsta, but Cloudways offers them in all of its plans.
Team collaboration
Cloudways offers you the option of giving people as much access to your website as you want. So that no unwanted action can take place by any person. In addition, they give us the gift of Git integration, which is a must for developers because it's not just one individual working on a project, but a team of people doing it. These features pave a great way to enable teamwork in an efficient way.
Security
The experts at Cloudways protect your installation from attack by issuing regular operating system and firmware upgrades as a managed cloud hosting platform. Cloudways also offers free SSL certifications, which should be considered critical data security if you plan to sell anything. Additionally, Rackspace's proposed email includes Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) authentication technologies for enhanced protection.
Unlimited site hosting
Cloudways has set absolutely no limits to the number of websites you want to host with their services. As a result, people who run and manage various websites will surely choose Cloudways.
Web server software
Cloudways uses various well-known web server software such as Apache 2.4 and php 7.4. The operating system used here is Debian 9, a very reliable and user-friendly operating system.
PCI compliance
Let's say you sell products on your website and want to offer your customers the option to pay online. Then it's good news for you that Cloudways is PCI compliant. You can communicate with their support staff and let them know that they will make the necessary arrangements for you.
Payment and pricing
Now comes the most awaited question of all readers and users, the cost of using all these amazing services. The most amazing thing about cloudways is that they don't tie you into binding contracts with upfront payments for a year or two.
They have an amazing system of "PAY AS U GO" which essentially means that you only have to pay for the services that you have consumed. This is an amazing feature that is really beneficial for people with relatively newer businesses. This payment mechanism thus negates the need for a refund policy.
When we talk about pricing, we have to keep in mind that cloudways offers hosting from 5 different hosting providers, all of which have their own plans on their own websites.
However, you will find that Cloudways' prices are about double that of the hosting sites themselves, but you need not worry because this expense is worth it. The services that Cloudways offers will make you want to spend double the amount.
Don't take our word for it, go to their website yourself and sign up for the free 3-day trial. You'll fall in love with the simplicity and flexibility the system offers.
Plans offered
Several plans are offered in accordance with each of the hosting provider company rates, the cheapest of which are offered by Digital Ocean, being around $ 10 for the most basic plans. As the price increases, so does the number of services offered. These plans go from as cheap as $ 10 to $ 1000 dollars or more. Specific details about each and every plan offered is presented on their website in a detailed manner so that you can decide what you need easily.
Pros. and cons. in a nutshell
Cloudways has tons of benefits, but it also falls short in a few places. However, these are just healthy tradeoffs in favor of valuable features like better traffic handling, etc. These pros and cons are summarized in the following lines:
Advantages
- Lightning-fast servers
- Great regular updates
- Good customer service
- Staging facility
- Simple scalability
- High traffic handling
- No long-term obligations or advance payments
- Prices are justified
- Number of inodes is more than enough
- Offers free migration of a website to cloudways
Disadvantages
- No e-mail hosting
- No own domain registration
- A learning curve
Bottom line
Cloudways is a great, affordable service that offers ease of use for everyone and checks off all the boxes on a website owner's checklist for their dream website. It's especially an excellent option for people who are looking to get their websites live for the first time and don't want to spend their valuable time solving the plethora of minute issues that come with website hosting and maintenance.
FAQ's
Is Cloudways a hosting provider?
No. Technically speaking, Cloudways is not a hosting provider itself. Instead, it is a bridge between hosting providers and people who want to host their websites. It offers services and makes the whole process much easier.
How secure is Cloudways?
End-to-end encryption on the Cloudways platform ensures that all data is encrypted in transit and protected using the HTTPS protocol to prevent data from being accessed while it is being transferred from one system to another.
How do I migrate my website from WordPress (or another hosting provider) to Cloudways?
You can do this by following the steps below.
- Install Cloudways WordPress Migrator on your current hosting server.
- Enter the required login data.
- Click on Migrate.
Not to mention that the migration is not only simple and easy, but also absolutely free and you will not incur any additional costs.
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