Cloudways Review: Faster than the Fastest WordPress Cloud Hosting
Let me guess. The major reason you are reading this review is that you are fed up with your current hosting provider and looking for options that can bring your business back on the right track. Don’t worry, this post is all about that.
Before we get started, let’s learn a little about WordPress platform statistics. This will give you a better idea about choosing the right host for your WordPress based websites.
WordPress Statistics You Should Know
- WordPress is the most used Content Management System (CMS) in the world with 35% market share
- WordPress has been downloaded more than 1 billion times
- Almost 500 WordPress websites are being launched every day
- WordPress has over 50,000 plugins and many new ones are being added every day
- WordPress-based ecommerce platform WooCommerce powers 22% of ecommerce stores worldwide
Why Do Most WordPress Websites Fail?
Since WordPress is the biggest CMS platform, the failure ratio of websites built with WordPress is also high. WordPress is the widely hacked platform online and 41% WordPress websites are hacked because of vulnerabilities within the web hosting infrastructure that WordPress users have.
Source: ZDnet
There are many reasons for website failures. Some of the major reasons WordPress-based websites fail include:
- Slow site performance
- Lack of scalability
- Unnecessary yet repetitive downtime
- Unsustainable hosting infrastructure
- Lack of hosting support
And many more...
Think about it.
Your website gets a surge in traffic during the sales season. But since its bandwidth is limited, you cannot scale. What’s the outcome?
Your site goes offline resulting in damage to brand reputation, a decrease in rankings, and a gap in customer orders. Now scale this scenario to multiple similar instances and you are doomed for good.
Take the example of Incluyeme, a job portal based on WordPress CMS. Incluyeme’s CEO Gabriel Marcolongo says, “Our previous hosting provider helped us in the beginning, but to keep growing we needed to move to a better hosting solution that was scalable so that we could easily grow for the next few years without hassle.”
Gabriel was looking for a decent alternative and found one in the shape of Managed Cloud Hosting. He is now content with the hosting infrastructure and can work seamlessly on his business endeavors.
How to Resolve WordPress Hosting Issues?
Since most of the WordPress performance issues are related to poor hosting infrastructure, you can easily fix these site issues by moving to another, better, and reliable hosting server. Most new WordPress website owners are unsure what type of web hosting service will work best for them. That’s why we have created a table highlighting the pros and cons of each type of hosting infrastructure and its cost.
| Hosting | Pros | Cons | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared | Low cost | Limited bandwidth and storage | ~$10 |
| VPS | Scalable | High cost | ~$30 |
| Dedicated | Dedicated | Unscalable, high cost | ~$50 |
| Cloud | Dedicated, scalable, low cost | Unmanaged | ~$5 |
| Managed Cloud | Managed, dedicated, scalable, low cost | - | ~$10 |
Most businesses start with a shared hosting server. However, after a few months in, when the business starts to scale, they realize that shared hosting is limited in functionality and they simply can't scale their servers with ease. That’s when they decide to move to a VPS or a dedicated server. But both of these have their fair share of drawbacks. Their next option is to move to a cloud hosting solution. But most cloud hosts are unmanaged and require the services of a system administrator to manage them optimally.
Salary.com puts the hourly wage of a server administrator between $30 & $35. This is how much you will be paying to the server administrator for managing your dedicated or cloud server. It sounds like an expensive option.
Finally, the store owners can choose a managed cloud hosting for their business because it offers all the solutions that users are looking for. But how is a managed hosting different from other hosting providers? Let’s find out.
What is a Managed Hosting? Why You Should Get it?
Consider a managed hosting as a concierge service that handles all the technical aspects of your WordPress server. This includes optimizing speed, providing security, enhancing scalability, and keeping consistent uptime of the website. The idea of a managed hosting service is to make the whole server handling process as smooth as it can get. The end-user, who in our case is the WordPress website owner, will have ample time to work on his/her actual business and its growth. On the other hand, the server is managed by the support team of the hosting provider.
Cloudways managed cloud hosting pricing page
Reasons for getting a managed hosting server for your business include:
- Hosting issues can have a domino effect on your business, decreasing efficiency, increasing hurdles, and reducing order volume. If you want complete freedom from all these hosting issues, getting a managed hosting server will be a great idea.
- Lagging performance can reduce the number of visitors coming to your store, a managed hosting server enhances site performance by integrating server-level cache and improving server load time.
- A better hosting solution will allow you to plan for the long-term success of your business without worrying about infrastructure problems
How Does Cloudways Managed Hosting Help?
Cloudways is a managed hosting platform that offers fully-scalable, dedicated, and secure servers to the users. Users will only have to pay for the services they use through the pay-as-you-go model.
With Cloudways, users can select from five different cloud service providers including DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Engine (GCE), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Vultr, and Linode to launch their cloud server. Cloudways will act as a second layer of management that will help with the security, performance, and other technical details.
Server launch process takes only a few minutes on Cloudways
What Features Cloudways Offers for WordPress Users?
Here are the features of Cloudways managed hosting.
- Enhanced Security
Cloudways offers numerous features including IP whitelisting, server firewall, database security, application isolation, and two-factor authentication. These all combine from an ironclad layer around your web server.
- Unlimited Scalability
Every WordPress website needs unlimited scalability and that’s what Cloudways offers to its users. By launching your server on Cloudways, you can easily scale vertically with the click of a button. This saves you time and money.
- Easy to Customize
Unlike other cloud hosting platforms, Cloudways has made it fairly easy for users to manage their servers using the GUI platform. You don’t need to FTP or SSH to connect to your server as the platform offers all options on the GUI based platform.
- Exceptional Support
Whether you want to migrate to your website, require monitoring logs, or get stuck at some point, and you need help. Cloudways support team is always ready to help you.
- Complete Control
With Cloudways, your server is completely under your control. On other cloud hosting servers, you can’t scale your server or add block storage with the click of a button. But with Cloudways, all this is possible. We encourage you to scale your servers when needed to sustain site performance.
Cloudways offers server and application monitoring features
- Dedicated Environment
Cloudways offers a dedicated server with its own bandwidth limit, RAM, and storage capacity. This means no one else will be sharing your server and you can monitor all of this through the Cloudways server monitoring feature.
- Super-Fast CDN
CloudwaysCDN is a powerful yet simple service that delivers superior performance and top-of-the-chart global response times. It can be integrated with a few clicks without any technicalities.
- Protected SSL Layer
Keep eavesdroppers at bay with the SSL protection layer. Cloudways offers free domain-level SSL security through Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificates.
- SSD-Based Hosting
Witness lightning fast website speeds for your WordPress server with Cloudways SSD storage. It is 3x faster than the regular storage speed and offers breathtaking performance and enhanced page load times.
- Powerful Hosting Stack
Cloudways has created ‘ThunderStack’ the most powerful hosting stack with four-layer of server-level caches including Redis, Memcached, Nginx and Varnish to expedite performance.
Launch Your Cloudways WordPress Server
You can set up your website on a Cloudways server in under 10 minutes. Here's how the whole process goes.
- First of all, create an account on Cloudways hosting platform. Signing up takes only three steps.
- Now, launch your first Cloudways server by clicking on the ‘Launch Server’ button in the middle of the screen
Cloudways GUI - Server selection process
The whole Graphical User Interface (GUI) is made so that even novice users feel comfortable launching their very first cloud server.
- Let’s launch WordPress on the DigitalOcean server. You will have to select a WordPress version and name your server before selecting a cloud infrastructure provider.
Now, select the Server Size for your web server.
- Next, select the location of the data center where your server will be hosted. Remember to keep it close to your target audience so that it can decrease page load time.
- Next launch your Cloudways server by pressing the ‘Launch Now’ button.
- The server will take around 10 minutes at max to set up resources and install the chosen application on the server before it is ready.
Congrats! Your Cloudways server has launched successfully.
What Makes Cloudways the Fastest WordPress Cloud?
Cloudways has made it easy for users to double their server speeds and enjoy the unmatchable performance. The reason why Cloudways is one of the fastest WordPress hosting cloud platforms relates to the fact that it offers four server-level caches. Apart from that, users can also add app-level cache such as Breeze for WordPress.
WordPress Speed Test Cloudways vs Other Cloud Hosting Platforms
Website Hosting Rating did a comparison of Cloudways with other web hosting services and here are the results of their findings.
They did a speed test of a single WordPress blog both on Cloudways and the other host.
Another cloud service provider hosted a website for 544 milliseconds.
The same website loaded on Cloudways for 499 milliseconds, around 50 milliseconds faster.
WPBlog also made a comparison between Cloudways and a WordPress cloud host, both scored almost the same.
Other cloud host loaded the site completely in 1.1 seconds.
Similarly, Cloudways also loaded the website in 1.1 seconds as well.
Cloudways also wins when it comes to pricing. A user can launch this server on Cloudways for $10 only. However, other cloud hosts are charging $30 for launching the same server.
The first image is of Cloudways pricing. Source: Omnicoreagency.com*
Similarly, when we conducted the tests, a WordPress website on Cloudways only took 0.3 seconds to load completely. This is much faster than what you will get on other hosting service providers.
What Do Customers Love about Cloudways?
People love Cloudways for its support and scalable service. Most of the Cloudways users have said that the service has given them the ‘ability to transform agency and cater to multiple clients all at once’.
Others have said that they feel ‘confident in hosting their clients with Cloudways.’
Cloudways Review: Bottom-line
Cloudways' managed hosting platform is changing the lives of its users by providing exceptional services at half the cost that others in the cloud industry charge. It has given users an option that they previously didn’t have. Now, instead of moving to a shared hosting server, they can easily launch a Cloudways managed cloud server with minimal effort and go about doing their business. If they face server issues, Cloudways' support team is ever-ready to help solve their worries and keep them growing at the speed of their choice.
You may like to read this post: Online Presence Establishment from 0 to Website with Cloudways Managed Cloud Hosting!
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://jerrybanfield.com/cloudways-review/