Cloudways Review – Managed WordPress Hosting

Cloudways hosting review

It’s essential for every WordPress user to choose the right WordPress theme and necessary plugins for their business website. Similarly, selecting the right hosting for your WordPress site is equally essential because it helps your business website grow and prosper. 

In this article, I’ll take you through a detailed overview of Cloudways with a closer look at key features that makes Cloudways a fast, unique, compelling, and above all, a proper hosting solution for your business.

Table of Content

 

Choosing the right hosting solution for your websites could be overwhelming mainly because of the many hosting providers out there. 

To make things easier for you, I will discuss Cloudways, a managed cloud hosting provider that comes with robust features, high performance, and faster speed, all at an affordable price. 

So let’s get started!

Cloudways Highlights:

  • 5 cloud providers (Google, Amazon, DigitalOcean, etc.)
  • A managed cloud hosting platform
  • Super-fast and secure managed servers
  • Free SSL certificates
  • Easy-to-use platform interface
  • Pay-as-you-go billing plans
  • Free WordPress migrator plugin
  • Site and server cloning
  • Affordable prices
  • Unlimited applications on a server
  • Powerful packages like Redis, Memcached, and Varnish
  • 24/7/365 customer support


Cons of Cloudways:

  • Doesn’t include email hosting

 

Cloudways Overview

Cloudways is a fully managed WordPress hosting provider that delivers all the essential tools a business needs for deploying and managing WordPress websites. It offers a simple and intuitive platform that is specially designed to maintain maximum performance, speed, and security.

Cloudways offers the choice of five top cloud infrastructure providers including DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, and Google Cloud. In practical terms, Cloudways takes care of all server configurations and removes hindrances while letting you focus on your business.

 

Cloudways Performance

Website performance is an essential factor in your business’s growth because a slow website generally results in a loss of traffic and conversions. Cloudways provides a simple solution where it enhances the cloud servers by integrating powerful caching technologies such as Redis and Varnish. As a result, you would see a dramatic improvement in your website’s performance.

To test this claim, I performed a site speed test using GTmetrix. For this, I installed three popular plugins (WooCommerce, Yoast, Elementor) and page builder framework on my test website. The website was hosted on a 1GB DigitalOcean server. Incidentally, this server costs around $10. 

And here are the results…

Cloudways performance

As you can judge for yourself, this is the fastest WordPress hosting.

 

Cloudways Security

Maintaining your website’s security might be the biggest challenge you can face as a WordPress website owner. While you are running your WordPress website, you must have noticed that the number of attacks has increased drastically which means you need a highly secure platform to have some peace of mind. 

Cloudways come with different security layers that make your server really difficult to penetrate. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that it provides you with just the right security tools to make your server and application secure at all levels.  

 

Salient Security Features:

  • A firewall that allows access only to specific ports.
  • SSH/SFTP logins to deal with brute force login attacks. 
  • Cloudways offers a free SSL certificate by Let’s Encrypt, along with the support for paid SSL certificates.
  • Two-factor Authentication (TFA) enabled by default.
  • Database security where you can whitelist the IP addresses that can access the database remotely.
  • End-to-end encryption for data transfer.

 

The Cloudways Platform

Deploying a cloud server like AWS can become quite tiresome and managing a WordPress application installed on these servers can often become a challenge even for seasoned developers. Cloudways makes server provisioning and configuration a lot easier.

 

With Cloudways Platform, you can quickly launch a cloud server on one of the 65+ data centers. You can even install unlimited WordPress applications on a single server without any extra charges with server specifications being the only real restriction. 

Cloudways platform

However, if you think you are hitting the specification limit, scaling server resources is a matter of a few clicks.

Cloudways offers a server management panel through which you can easily manage all the server-related configurations. You’ll find different sections on the panel, and each section delivers a separate set of server management functions.

Let’s take a brief look!

  • Master Credentials: You’ll find server access credentials (IP, username, and password) in this section.
  • Monitoring: You can monitor your server’s resources (RAM usage, CPU usage, disk usage, etc.).
  • Manage Services: You can manage core services and settings (Apache, NGINX, Varnish, etc.).
  • Settings and Packages: You can manage server-level settings (execution limit, upload size, etc.) and manage packages (Redis, Database & PHP versions, etc.).
  • Security: Manage security settings (whitelist IPs, SSH/SFTP, etc.).
  • Vertical Scaling: You can increase your server size in a few clicks.
  • Backups: You can manage backups (schedule time, backup frequency, etc.).
  • SMTP: You can configure SMTP services for your server.

Just like the server management panel, Cloudways offers an application management panel that allows you to manage several application-level settings and configurations. This also consists of different sections, and each section serves a different purpose.

 

  • Access Details: You’ll see your application URL, admin panel credentials, and DB access credentials.
  • Monitoring: You can monitor your application (traffic, PHP performance, analyzing logs, and more).
  • Domain Management: You can point to the primary domain and additional domains from here.
  • Cron Job Management: You can add a Cron job for your application.
  • SSL certificate: Install a free SSL certificate or bring your paid certificates without any issues.
  • Backup and Restore: Restore your files and database.
  • Deployment Via Git: Deploy code via Git.
  • Application Settings: Manage application settings for Varnish, SSH access, etc.
  • Migration Tools: Free WordPress migration plugin that helps you bring your application to the Cloudways Platform.
  • CloudwaysCDN: You can configure CloudwaysCDN easily from here.


As you can see, the Cloudways Platform enables you to invest time and energy in your business rather than maintaining complex servers.

Cloudways Support

Cloudways offers 24/7/365 free standard support to all users and aims to provide prompt assistance to your queries. You can contact the support team over live chat, create a ticket, use the Cloudways User Facebook group, and even refer to the detailed KB to resolve your query.

 

Final Thoughts!

Now you know how Cloudways helps your business grow and expand in this challenging digital world. We’ve discussed the key features that make Cloudways a better hosting option for SMBs.

No doubt, the Cloudways platform is powerful and robust, but to achieve peak performance, you need to know how to optimize the packages and features that it offers.

Cloudways offers a 3-day free trial. So give it a try and make your website faster.

 

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Alina is a digital marketer with a passion for web design. When she's not strategizing she's doing photography, listening to podcasts on history and psychology, and playing with her 2 dogs and cat.

 

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