In a cluttered world of hosting services, it is difficult to find one that covers all aspects of what makes a hosting service great. After putting various hosting services through their paces, I decided to leave the best for last.
Cloudways Introduction
Welcome to an unbiased Cloudways review, a managed hosting provider that promises to deliver the best web hosting for WooCommerce in terms of speed, security, and support, the 3 pillars of a successful hosting service.
Let’s start with a fact-
According to industry insight, more than 61.2% of sites across the Internet are based on WordPress alone.
WordPress being the most popular content management system ever deserves the special treatment, and only a managed hosting provider is capable of giving your WooCommerce website the edge when it comes to performance, security, and support.
The Cloudways Experience
About Cloudways
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform offering exceptional hosting service to its users.
To help you stay focused on the main show, Cloudways manages all the technical stuff that takes place behind the curtain. Some of the main features included with every account on Cloudways includes 24×7 support, free SSL certificate, pay as you go payment system, free migration, platform-level security protocols and lots of features engineered for users of every level.
Let’s go over some of the features offered by Cloudways for WooCommerce websites.
Cloudways Features
Multiple Cloud Infrastructures
It allows you to deploy and manage your applications on various hosting platforms. You can choose from
- DigitalOcean
- Linode
- Vultr
- Google cloud engine
- AWS
The most impressive part is that you don’t even need an account on any of these platforms. Just one account on Cloudways is enough to get you up and running.
It is interesting to know that the entire Cloudways platform is entirely based on ThunderStack. Additionally, it offers Varnish, Memcache, Apache, PHP-FPM, PHP 7, Redis and Nginx layers.
When you combine all these web technologies in one package, you get superb page loading speeds and performance without downtime.
This mixed layer of ultrafast caching offers up to 99.99% up-time to hosted websites, one of the many advantages Cloudways has when compared to its competitors.
Multiple Server Locations
You can choose from 60+ worldwide server locations. With just a click on your preferred location, you can deploy your website or application in that region. Isn’t that awesome?
This feature facilitates you to prioritize your target audience much better. As a result, you will naturally see better reach and higher conversion rates.
Vertical Scaling
With 1-click scaling, you can increase your server and application size as per your requirements whenever you want in case your WooCommerce store starts getting more traffic.
1-Click Cloning
Cloning feature gives you the power to replicate your entire website without any issues or bugs. These clones can help you copy codes and designs for your website in case you need to revert to an earlier version.
Backup & Restore
Did you just type in a wrong code and are worried that your website may be at risk? With 1-click Backup & Restore you can recover your hard work without problems.
The Backup & Restore feature helps you create multiple backups and restore them in case of any errors or misconfiguration. It comes with automated instances that can be ranged from hourly, daily to weekly backups.
The Cloudways Experience
Staging URLs
Not all hosting platforms offer Staging URLs. Cloudways is one such hosting platform that gives you the option to have a separate staging url for your web application.
This feature gives you the freedom to test your web applications on separate sub-domains provided free of cost. It allows you to find and fix all your bugs and errors and once you are ready, with just a click of a button your staging site will be live.
Multiple Apps Support
Cloudways supports not only WooCommerce but also a wide range of other applications. You have a choice of pre-packaged applications that can be deployed without any extra settings.
For those with coding knowledge, there is PHP or Laravel. If you are looking to launch an eCommerce store, you can select either WordPress, Magento or PrestaShop. For any other website, there is, of course, the very popular WooCommerce.
Cloudways Bot
It is an automated and user-friendly bot integrated within the Cloudways platform that offers cloud notifications on the go. It is worth noting that no other hosting platform provides such an assistant.
It helps you get familiar with the account management interface. It notifies you about your server/application updates, rolls out backups and allows you to connect to different social platforms.
WordPress Migrator Tool
Not all cloud hosting platforms offer customers the tools to help them migrate their WooCommerce websites. Cloudways provides an integrated WordPress Migrator Tool to easily migrate their websites to their platform.
This tool enables users to migrate their website from any other hosting platform without any bugs and errors. Your data will be securely transferred, not to mention the first migration is done Free.
Cloudways Pricing & Plans
Cloudways offers users a crystal clear pricing plan that is easy to understand and use. They follow a Pay-as-you-Go model which means that you will only be charged for the features you use.
You can find bundled pricing packages in addition to other requirements you may have. Compared to other hosting platforms, Cloudways offers the best prices according to the features it provides with prices starting at just $10/month.
Wrapping it Up
I think Cloudways is a great hosting platform as it offers users the liberty to perform many server/application processes through 1-click features. I love the fantastic interface which they offer but what I love most is their active 24×7/365 support.
If you are looking forward to hosting your WooCommerce website, then give Cloudways – Managed Cloud Hosting Platform a shot. If you found this review interesting, don’t hold back, leave a comment and share your experience with Cloudways in the provided section below.
I’m on Cloudways at the moment and sure – they have the right setup but the support is terrible. Its that bad we’ve been waiting for around a month for a problem to be fixed and they just seem unable to get it right.
Since day 1 – permission errors, then 403 varnish errors, then 503 NGINX errors and now we are getting 500…
I’ve got a high priority ticket with them and for the last 48 ours i’ve been told 4 or 5 times that I am going to get a responce soon – nothing.
I am so dissapointed, our customers websites are taking the hit and Cloudways really couldn’t care. I would love to highly rate them like this post but they have some serious sorting out to do in the support department.