Any business regardless of its size needs to have a high-quality website to communicate with its customers. A digital presence is more important to businesses more than ever before. However, setting up a website and maintaining it is time-consuming and difficult. Managed hosting services do exist to take some of the stress out of managing a website, but they aren’t perfect. Cloudways is an interesting service that promises to make hosting your site quicker and easier. This Cloudways review will look at how Cloudways can help to simplify your hosting requirements.
What is Cloudways?
Cloudways is a bit different from most traditional web hosting providers. Most web hosting companies have their servers in data centers which they need to maintain and manage. This means that you normally need to stick to well-known companies who host reliable servers so your site is available most of the time.
Cloudways allows you to host your site on several different hosting providers, but they offer a managed solution. Cloudways do not own the servers, but they will be able to set them up, design, and maintain your site for a small monthly fee.
Pros
- Very fast hosting
- State of the art, Reliable servers
- Easy to use managed applications
- Control Panel makes it easy to maintain your site
- SSL Certificates Included
- Ability to choose from 5 different hosting providers
- One-click WordPress installation
- 24/7 Support
Ease of Use
Choosing a hosting provider is notoriously difficult. Especially if you want a web host that offers ongoing management of the website. You may be restricted to certain packages and types of servers. Cloudways isn’t anything like this, you can choose to host with many very well known hosting companies, including:
- AWS (Amazon Web Services)
- Google Cloud Hosting
- Linode
- Digital Ocean
- Vultr
Start by choosing the hosting provider you want to use, Cloudways will handle everything with one single monthly payment. All of these hosting providers are reputable companies and are well known for providing high-quality reliable hosting packages. You can take a look at the different hosting packages to find out what each offers. It’s nice that you can host with a big known name rather than having to use an unknown hosting company.
Easy Server Configuration
Configuring a server is normally quite complicated and involved, but Cloudways takes all of this difficulty out of the process. Choosing the hosting packages is very simple. Just by estimating how many pages views your website will get in a month and a suitable server package will be recommended. If you do want more control then you can configure a server manually.
Simple Server Migration
If you already have a website live on another server then the thought of moving it to a new host might be very scary. Cloudways will handle everything to move the site to its new home without you having to lift a finger. The existing site can be left live so visitors to your site won’t notice any difference.
Cloudways even has a WordPress migrator plugin. This plugin can be installed on your existing WordPress website to handle the entire migration process to move your WordPress site to Cloudways hosting packages.
High Uptime
Cloudways hosts on reliable hardware which should mean your site is almost always available. Of course, no hosting platform can ever offer a true 100% uptime guarantee. However, Cloudways does the best it can. They use their system to mirror your site between multiple servers, should one server go down then traffic will be automatically routed to the backup. This should mean that your site will be available to visitors almost all the time.
International Hosting
As the sites will be hosted on big companies’ servers it’s possible to choose the location of the data center. By choosing to host the site in a data center close to your target audience you will speed up access to your site and make it much more user-friendly. Make sure you select the location of the data center when you are creating your server. It’s also possible to use the control panel to create mirrors in different data centers for different audiences to access.
Cloud Hosted Apps
Cloudways specializes in managing cloud applications for you. It will streamline the process and make installing and managing web applications straightforward. Cloudways offers a 1 click installation for some of the best-known apps including:
- WordPress
- Magento Commerce
- WooCommerce
- PHP
Other Applications
As well as the one-click applications, it’s also possible to install other apps on Cloudways hosting, including:
- osCommerce
- Joomla!
- Drupal
- Zencart
- CakePHP
These other applications are a bit more complicated to set up but are still fairly straightforward. There are various guides on the community forums that can assist you. Support will also help install and maintain these sites on your server.
One-Click WordPress Install
One of the most common uses for Cloudways hosting is to host WordPress sites. The one-click WordPress install simplifies and speeds up the process of setting up new WordPress sites. As WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system, simplifying the install will be very attractive.
If you are considering setting up a WordPress website then you won’t be able to find an easier way to get one set up. With a single click, you can launch your new WordPress site. Then it can be configured using the built-in control panel.
Scaleable
The nice thing about hosting with Cloudways is that everything is fully scaleable. You can start on a small hosting package for a very low monthly cost, then should your website become more popular and you attract more visits, then you can upgrade onto bigger hosting packages. The packages start at around $10 a month and go up to hundreds depending on the amount of storage, bandwidth, and server specifications you require.
Free Trial
If you’re not sure whether Cloudways is right for you then you should try out the free trial. The free trial lasts for 30 days and will allow you to test out the platform and see whether it’s right for you. Most people who try out the platform will discover just how easy it is and how much time it can save.
Easy and Cheap Monthly Payments
Cloudways accepts payments using a card, or through your Paypal account. The payments will be taken from your card every month. The monthly payments are typically very low considering you are paying for a managed hosting package where you don’t have to do anything to maintain your website.
Cloudways can offer such great monthly prices since they have a good relationship with the hosting companies. This typically means that you can get a managed hosting package for only a little bit more than hosting with an unknown hosting company.
Excellent Support
No matter how reliable and professional a hosting company is, you are always going to experience problems. If you are trying to set up a new site or just don’t understand how to do something, then you will want some help and guidance. Cloudways can help in several ways. They offer 24/7/365 support which makes it possible for you to connect with technical support whenever you need them day or night. This is especially important since websites can be run from anywhere in the world.
There is also a very useful knowledge base that contains lots of information and guides laid out in an easy-to-understand way. There are also community forums where you can search, ask questions, and also help other people who may be looking for similar solutions to problems you have already sorted.
Cons
- Domain names need to be registered externally
- Email hosting isn’t included as standard
Domain names need to be registered externally
Unlike traditional hosting packages, it won’t be possible to register a domain name as part of your hosting package. This may seem like a bit of a problem, but it’s not necessarily. You will be able to easily register a domain name with a registrar. Cloudways support will assist you to set the domain name up so that it points to your web host. It’s not a major problem and can be solved easily. Also by keeping the domain name separate it makes renewing the domain name much easier.
Email hosting isn’t included as standard
Most traditional hosting platforms include free mailboxes as standard. Cloudways does not offer mailboxes as standard. However, it is possible to add on IMAP or POP3 mailboxes using a Rackspace addon. These are cheap and will be set up automatically for you. It’s possible to register as many email boxes as you require.
Verdict
Cloudways is one of the best hosting platforms that you can choose. Whether you have a new website or an existing one you want to move to, Cloudways then it’s a great choice. They will take all the stress out of running your website so that you have more time to run your business and grow your customer base. Visit Cloudways today and take a look at the different hosting packages they offer and just how attractively priced they are.
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Prabhu Ganesan provides his web development and WordPress services independently. He is the founder of WPBlogX. He is very much involved in WordPress as it becomes second nature for him. You can get in touch with him by visiting his website – WPBlogX.com and you can also find him on Twitter @gprabhucbe.