Hosting is a popular topic when it comes to WordPress sites. Many users often find it difficult to choose the right hosting solution for their website and sometimes it could become a tedious task. The reason is simple, you have a lot of options available out there and you can't test them all.
Considering that, today, I'm going to help you choose the right hosting provider that will not only fulfill your website needs but will also give you a hassle-free working environment. So, in this article, I am going to cover a detailed review of Cloudways --- a high performance WordPress managed hosting and will also discuss the prominent features that make Cloudways stand out from the rest.
Cloudways Overview
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that is partnered with the five top cloud infrastructure providers including AWS, DO, Vultr, Linode, and Google Cloud Platform. It offers a flexible hosting environment that improves your work productivity and gives you a hassle-free experience.
It comes with two intuitive panels; server management and application management. On each panel, you can perform all the essential tasks and configurations. In short, it simplifies the hosting process and provides you a managed platform while handling all the complex server configurations.
Server Management: Server related configurations.
Application Management: Application related configurations.
Cloudways Security
For a site owner, maintaining security is the biggest and ongoing challenge, especially with the increasing number of attacks and threats that can cause huge loss of data and can damage your site. This is why you have to make sure that you take various security measures to protect it from hackers. With Cloudways, your site is in good hands because their expert team is ready to deal with security threats and vulnerabilities as soon as they are discovered.
Cloudways platform comes with different security features that are designed to secure your site and server at all levels. Let's take a brief look at its security features.
Bot Protection (Free Feature): Cloudways in partnership with MalCare introduced application-level security protection that identifies bad bots, blocks malicious traffic, and protects your site from attacks like Brute Force, Web Scraping, etc. This feature monitors all the activities and provides a detailed traffic report.
With a click of a button, you can enable the bot protection feature.
SSL Certificates: Cloudways offers free SSL certificates and with a click of a button you can quickly install it.
It supports Let's Encrypt and custom SSL certificates.
Two Factor Authentication: Two Factor Authentication is a great way to strengthen the platform security protection and help you protect your account (access) from attackers or unauthorized users.
Database Security: It is important to secure your site from all angles that's why Cloudways also takes care of your site data. By default, you can't access your database remotely and to enable this function you have to whitelist your IP addresses (minimize the unwanted database access).
SSH/SFTP Logins: Brute force is a common cyberattack where a hacker tries to log in to your server by attempting many passwords and its combinations. Cloudways has a very powerful system where it blocks the IPs that try to exploit your SSH/SFTP.
You can also block all the IPs and grant permission access only to specific IPs (whitelist IPs).
Firewalls: Cloudways comes with a dedicated firewall that protects your site by allowing access only to specific ports.
Cloudways Performance
When you're considering an optimized performance-oriented hosting then it would not be wrong to say that Cloudways is at the top of the list.
Cloudways has a very unique and optimized stack that is specially designed to improve your site performance. It uses a combination of Apache as a web server, NGINX as a reverse proxy, MariaDB as a database solution, PHP, and LINUX as an Operating System. Here, you'll also find different performance catalysts such as Redis, Varnish, and many more.
The best part is that, with Cloudways, you can also manage your packages with a click of a button.
CloudwaysCDN
Cloudways also offers a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that will help you boost your site performance and faster page-loading. The website's static content will be cached by CloudwaysCDN and served to the audience from the closest servers.
Cloudways Data Centers
It is always recommended to launch a server that is nearest to your target audience. Thanks to Cloudways, it offers 65+ server locations and choice over the top 5 IaaS providers.
Free WordPress Cache Plugin
Cloudways has its own cache plugin known as Breeze and has more than 100,000 active installations. This is a great plugin that is designed to improve your site speed and performance. It comes with robust features like file-level caching, database caching, browser caching, and much more. Also, it has an advanced option from where you can exclude particular URLs, JS files, and CSS files that you wish not to cache.
Advanced Caches
Cloudways takes care of your site performance at all levels. Therefore, it offers different advanced caching mechanisms like Redis, Varnish, and Memcached.
You can easily manage these from the manage services section like enable, purge, restart, and many more with a click of button.
Cloudways Platform --- Developer Friendly
People working around different projects and always looking for a hosting solution that will fulfill their required needs. Cloudways is one of the best-managed hosting providers that offer a flexible working environment and improve work and team productivity.
Cron Job Management
What I like about Cloudways is that it provides every solution on its platform from basic to advanced setup. For instance, if you want to set up a cron job to your WordPress site then you have a Cron Job Management section on the application management panel. With a few clicks, you can quickly set up a cron job and not just only a basic PHP script (simple scheduled tasks) as you have an advanced cron job section available for complex scheduled tasks.
Git Deployment
If you have a number of people working around different projects and for team coordination, they use a version control system like GIT then you know how difficult it is to manage development workflow in a live environment. But Cloudways provides smooth and seamless integration with Git where you can easily deploy your code to your website.
WP-CLI
WP-CLI is a WordPress command-line interface used for interacting and managing WordPress sites without actually using a web browser. It includes a set of commands through which you can carry out administrator related tasks with ease.
Application Settings
This is an important section from where you can control and configure your application settings. From general configurations to Varnish settings.
Staging Site
Staging is a very essential feature and most of the developers test their site changes, updates, and bug fixes on a staging site before going to live.
With Cloudways, you can quickly create a staging of your WordPress site and easily manage (push and pull changes) the staging environment.
Server Cloning
For applications, you have a staging/cloning feature. Similarly, for servers, you have a cloning feature available where you can create a copy of your entire server.
Server cloning is too easy with Cloudways and all you need to do is click Clone server.
Cloudways Pricing
I love the pricing model of Cloudways as it offers a pay-as-you-go model that means they will charge you only for the resources that you consumed. Unlike conventional hosting, Cloudways doesn't bound you with yearly payment packages.
Cloudways offers a number of features at a very affordable price. The basic plan starts from $10/Month for which you get a 1 GB DO server, 1 core processor, 25GB storage, and 1 TB bandwidth.
Cloudways provides a powerful solution, and the basic DO plan is enough to run a small WooCommerce store. If you're planning to run a big and large WooCommerce store then you must have to consider the other essential WooCommerce items and their estimated cost. Cloudways has already estimated the budget you need so you can refer to it here.
Final Thoughts!
Now, you know why we recommend Cloudways to our users and why it is one of the leading hosting solutions. Cloudways offers rich features that help you improve your site security, performance, reliability, and even the right hosting environment that speeds up the work productivity level.
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The publication at Meta Box.
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