Cloudways: Why Is It Worth Using for WordPress Websites?

WordPress is the go-to platform for a number of developers and businesses due to the low entry barrier and flexibility. It is widely used across the globe to build a variety of websites and over the years, it has evolved into an ecosystem of thousands of contributors, community members, developers, and educators.

Unfortunately, many still believe that WordPress is an unreliable platform when it comes to building a serious business on top of it. It is a myth that the websites built on WordPress are sluggish, unsecured, and non-scalable. Whereas, the reality is totally opposite.

WordPress is an open-source platform that powers more than 34 percent of the web – which is huge! This number reflects the capability of this platform. However, when a WordPress site runs on an unreliable hosting server, it starts to create a lot of problems for the user.

Today, we will discuss the ideal web hosting for your WordPress site and will also review a popular managed hosting solution.

Table of Contents

• Why Do You Need a Managed WordPress Cloud Hosting?
  • Speed
  • Security
  • Ease-of-use
  • Scalability
• Cloudways – Managed Cloud Hosting Platform
  • Launch a Server & WordPress Site
  • Platform Overview
  • Migrations
  • Pricing
  • Support

Why Do You Need a Managed WordPress Cloud Hosting?

You can simply get yourself the most expensive, beefed-up server out there but if you are not skilled in server management or if you don’t hire a professional to do that; you can not leverage its computing power to the fullest.

An ideal option would be a managed WordPress hosting solution where your server is managed by professionals and you get to host your WordPress site on an optimized and secure server. To further answer this question, let’s look at some of the highlighted benefits of using a managed WordPress cloud hosting provider.

Speed

The speed of your website plays an important part in its SERPs as well as in user-experience and it depends on various parameters including hosting which is one of the fundamental factors.

Managed cloud hosting guarantees performance as it is built on an optimized cloud infrastructure. Not only that, your server and the base software is also updated to ensure maximum uptime and optimum performance.

Similarly, managed cloud hosting runs on SSD-based hard drives which are fast and more reliable than conventional hard disks. Caching is also used to boost performance and to minimize requests.

Security

In shared hosting, it is often seen that the website is hacked or compromised due to another affected site hosted on the same server. In managed cloud hosting websites are isolated and have no influence on any other website hosted on the same server. Each website runs in its own virtual environment.

A managed WordPress hosting also has other security measures in places such as dedicated firewall, Fail2Ban to protect from brute force attacks, SSL certificates, two-factor authentication, and IP Whitelisting for SSH and SFTP access.

Ease-of-use

Managed cloud hosting is easy to use and comes with an intuitive platform to manage complex tasks on a click of a button. This eliminates the hassle of running complex tasks manually using the command line. The platform comes with all the features you need to run and manage your WordPress sites.

This is great news for individuals and businesses who lack technical skills to manage a cloud server on their own. With this, they can consume high computing power and enjoy an intuitive platform.

Scalability

If you manage a server yourself, scaling its resources without prior knowledge is a nightmare. Managed cloud hosting makes it as easy as clicking a button. You can scale up your server to accommodate growing traffic on your WordPress site without any hassles.

This is ideal for e-commerce businesses that need to scale up their resources during the holiday season. By choosing a managed WordPress hosting solution, they can do this without switching to a larger server to change their hosting plans. Hence, uninterrupted service.

Cloudways – Managed Cloud Hosting Platform

Cloudways is one of the most renowned managed WordPress hosting solutions for both individuals and businesses. It is built for PHP based web applications, therefore, it offers maximum compatibility and performance to WordPress and WooCommerce sites.

Let me give a brief overview of its platform before you go and try it out yourself.

Launch a Server & WordPress Site

Have you ever launched a server yourself? If the answer is yes, you will be surprised to see how easy it is to launch a server using Cloudways. You can spin a whole server and have a WordPress or WooCommerce installed on it in just a few minutes.

Let me show you how.

After signing up for your Cloudways account, log in to its platform and select the desired specifications of your WordPress site.

Give a name to your WordPress site and your server and select the cloud provider. Cloudways allows you to choose a server from the top five cloud providers in the industry ie. AWS, Google Cloud, Linode, Vultr, and DigitalOcean.

Once you have chosen your desired infrastructure provider, pick the right server size and select the data-center location for your server. Cloudways offer 60+ data-centers spread across the globe which means you can host your WordPress site from anywhere in the world.

In the final step, hit the ‘LAUNCH NOW’ button to launch your server and your WordPress site.

Platform Overview

Cloudways platform is divided into two sub-sections.

• Server Management
• Application Management

Server Management

This area of the platform contains access credentials and useful features to manage your cloud server.

On the left side, we have the following options.

• Master Credentials – Contains credentials such as server IP, username, password, and options to create SSH public keys and launch a built-in SSH terminal.
• Monitoring – Server resources such as CPU, RAM, bandwidth, and disk usage can be monitored here.
• Manage Services – You can start and stop server resources here such as web server, database, Varnish, etc.
• Settings & Packages – Other settings and options are present here such as PHP and database versions, upload size limit, PHP execution limit, server maintenance, etc.
• Security – IP Whitelisting for SSH and SFTP access is controlled from here.
• Vertical Scaling – Here, you can scale up your server resources on a click of a button.
• Backups – You can either take an offline backup or set a frequency for auto-backups.
• SMTP – SMTP can be configured from here.

The other options include server transfer, server cloning, server restart, and delete server.

Application Management

Application Management contains options to manage website-related tasks.

• Domain Management – Here you can map your domain to your WordPress site.
• Cron Job Management – Here you can add and manage cron jobs.
• SSL Certificate – In this option, you can add a Free SSL certificate via Let’s Encrypt or add your custom certificate.
• Backup & Restore – Through this option, you can restore your WordPress site from an existing backup.
• Deployment via Git – Git is accessible through this option. Connect your WordPress site with your Git repo from here.
• Application Settings – Here you can rename the webroot folder, disable Varnish, disable application access, and configure PHP FPM settings.
• Migration Tools – Tools for migrating your WordPress site to Cloudways are present here.
• CloudwaysCDN – Integrate CDN service here.

Migrations

Migrating a WordPress site to Cloudways is super easy. Cloudways offers one free assisted migration in which one of their engineers migrate your WordPress or WooCommerce site to Cloudways. Apart from that, you can also use their WordPress migrator plugin to migrate unlimited websites to Cloudways for free.

Pricing

Cloudways bills its customers on a pay-as-you-go basis which means you are only charged for the resources you consume.

You can start at as low as $10/mo in which you get a 1GB DigitalOcean server with 25GB storage. Another prominent benefit of moving to Cloudways is unlimited websites per server which allows you to host as many websites as you wish and pay only for the server.

Support

Although the platform is very simple to use and offers great performance, Cloudways offers 24/7 live chat support. Cloudways customers can either reach an actual person through the live chat or can create a ticket for their query.

Cloudways has also prepared a detailed set of knowledge base articles to help its customers in addition to an active community present on various social media platforms to assist their customers in need.

Conclusion

In this highly competitive market, having a website hosted on a managed WordPress hosting definitely gives you an edge. It is all about availability, user-experience, and security. Cloudways is a comprehensive managed WordPress hosting solution that takes care of all your hosting needs at an affordable price.