Cloudways Hosting Reviews

The Cloudways Platform
For those who use WordPress or PHP based architecture as part of the foundation of your website technology, there’s Cloudways; the all in one managed solution for your hosting needs. Cloudways, as the name implies, is a cloud-based hosting company. Essentially, cloud hosting is a service that runs through a network of multiple servers, with many clients sharing multiple server resources on the ‘cloud’ virtual environment.

This type of hosting is more dynamic than traditional hosting environments, where there is a single server and thus a single point of failure. If that server fails, all of the sites running on that server will be affected until it is operational. Cloud hosting, however, allows for your data resource allocation to be bounced around between multiple servers. Given this setup, if one server goes down, there’s another server available to take its place. This type of architecture lends itself to scalability and growth as the traffic load can also be handled by multiple servers. So if your business is projected to grow significantly, cloud hosting may be a viable option for you.

Moreover, there are a lot of security benefits with this technology, as well as the aforementioned load balancing ability to handle traffic spikes on the cloud. Of course, the drawback to all of these features is that cloud hosting is significantly more expensive. If you’re just starting and the bottom line is price, shared hosting is likely the solution for you. On the other hand, if you’re an established e-commerce company with regular traffic or the need for premium security, look no further. Additionally, if you expect rapid growth, or your business experiences extreme traffic spikes, also consider cloud hosting; the load distribution will help keep your site alive in these conditions.

To be fair, there are a lot of WordPress specific hosting solutions out there. The vast majority offer traditional services, including shared, semi-dedicated, virtual private servers, and dedicated hosting, all with their own benefits and drawbacks. Cloudways is unique in that they offer a fully optimized and managed suite of services that make it easy to take advantage of cloud technology. On top of that, their basic plans provide an outstanding amount of features and tools to make your life easier as a business owner.

Included Add-ons
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Besides the basic features offered with every plan, Cloudways offers a lot of add-ons; one of the things that set their offerings apart is the Cloudways Content Delivery Network (CDN). The benefit of using a CDN is that when someone goes on your site from halfway across the world, the website will be served by the closest server; this vastly reduces load times and increases the availability of your website. With the Cloudways CDN, you can be sure that your site will load faster regardless of location.

Free Website Migration
All plans come with free migration services, so for businesses with a site hosted elsewhere and looking to make the switch, you will have all of the resources you need, even at the standard level of support. If your site is hosted on WordPress, this process is even more streamlined; Cloudways offers a WordPress plug-in for site migration, as simple as a few clicks. For sites hosted with Laravel or custom PHP, you have the next best option, a dedicated support team ready to help you out. All plans come with 24/7/365 live support, with upgrades to the ‘Advanced’ and ‘Premium’ support packages available to meet any business’s requirements. These are just some of the features offered with the Cloudways support system, which will be covered in depth later.

Team Management Software
Additionally, users have access to team management software, with team members able to work and collaborate on multiple projects and subprojects simultaneously. This is ideal for people managing various websites and project managers. A lot of the team management suite is geared to make the developer’s workflow more intuitive and seamless. For example, rich feature sets such as Github integration for developers, a staging area for testing and one-click cloning of applications, databases and servers. Another useful feature here is Cloudway’s one-click server ownership transfer, which allows you to transfer the keys of an application to a client once completed.