Cloudways: Managed Hosting Review: A Simple Guide for the Platform

Written By Peter L

On August 14, 2021
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When you search for the managed WordPress hosting, there is no doubt that you will be able to find many companies offering you quite similar services. Although managed WordPress hosting on VPS, shared or a dedicated server environment is being provided by the majority of the web hosts, but to have an out-of-the-norm unique managed to host solution for speed optimization, it will never be easy for you to find one. Cloudways is one such platform.

Cloud-based web hosting has become quite common nowadays, but Cloudways is a web hosting service that offers you various interesting things to stand out in a competition. With Cloudways hosting, you can select from any one of the different platforms like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and even a trial run where you don’t need to whip your credit card. It is among a few companies offering you a balance between great functionality and affordability, and therefore, this excellent cloud service is surely worth considering.

For a website’s performance, speed always plays a very important role, and you cannot ignore this to have a successful website. Having thousands of active installations, PageSpeedy.io is the most well-known of the speed-up plugins that work primarily on caching, minifying, and aggregating the script files. Other than that, you will find PageSpeedy to help compress and minimize various elements, and this is surely great to make your website much more lightweight.

Why do we need a managed hosting cloud platform like Cloudways?

Most of the time, we have issues regarding shared hosting, and the main problems might be related to budget as well as website speed. The best way is to switch towards the cloud platform if you are not willing to compromise on speed as well as other things. Other than that, you have to be quite a technical individual to own an unmanaged hosting platform, including Linode, Vultr, and DigitalOcean.

If you possess certain programs, you ought to be certain that you are in total mastery of the command line so that you can configure and reconfigure all of the servers. Unmanaged hosting provides you with only the server, and every other thing, including the base software like Apache and PHP, has to be installed by you. Therefore, just like WordPress or Drupal, you will have no pre-installed CMS.

Although you will find unmanaged hosting to be much cheaper than managed one, you are surely in full control of unmanaged hosting, which is its big plus point. There are diverse things that you have to control, like up-gradation of the software and servers, installation of security patches, SSL, and managing the database by the use of the command line. So, if you would like to get rid of any of such issues, then Cloudways hosting is the best platform for you.

cloudways

PC: G2

Creating Cloudways server and application

Create your account and sign up

The first major step is to create your Cloudways login account before you get started. For this, you have to enter the signup page and fill in any credentials that you consider necessary. If you like to have a 25% discount for the first 60 days, then you have the option of using a coupon code WPLogout.

After taking the first step, you will have to activate your after signing up for the email. With the help of the email account and the password assigned to you, you will be required to go to Cloudways Login in order to log in to the account.

Launch the server 

After login, the next step is launching the server and WordPress. You will observe the whole method to be very straightforward, as it has one-time perspectives. It is worth noting that choosing a server becomes one of the most important tasks, and you can select one of the five popular cloud providers.

A number of applications like WordPress, Laravel, Custom PHP, Opencart, Drupal, Prestashop, and Joomla are supported by Cloudways, but as the main focus is on WordPress in the Cloudways review. In the first step, you have to select WordPress as well as its version. Next, you will have to name the managed app like WPLogout and the Managed server like DigitalOcean.

Among AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr, you have to choose the cloud providers. You also have to select the server size and keep in mind that you can increase the plan whenever you like. In the next step, you will be required to choose the location, and if you would like to have the maximum speed for your website, go for the location that is closer to your visitors. Then, you can click the Launch Server option, which may take a few minutes. All these steps will have your WordPress site launched successfully.

cloudways login

PC: Ecommerce Platforms

Cloudways Server Management

When your server gets set up, you have to click the server and go to the Server Management Settings.

  • Server Credentials

In this particular area, you are able to get the credentials of the applications and the server. Basically, you are assigned a username, password, and the public IP of the server. In this particular area, you are also able to get access to SSH or SFTP.

As an alternative, you surely have the option to upload various SSH public keys to the Cloudways hosting server so that you can easily access them without any password prompts. It is possible that only with a single click, you easily can launch the SSH terminal. Therefore, in order to establish the terminal, no external software like puTTY is required.

  • Monitoring

When it is about the server-level monitoring of Cloudways, you get the option to reserve the resources and make sure that everything within the server is absolutely fine. The graphs, as well as the server resources utilization statistics, can be accessed here. It is worth noting that Cloudways has a partnership with New Relic. Therefore, it offers you built-in App Monitoring with this particular cloud hosting platform.

  • Manage Services

In this Cloudways review, there are a number of areas that you will start to get familiar with. The Manage Services area helps you to control several core services like MySQL, Apache, Nginx, Memcached, Redis, Varnish, etc.

You have to keep in mind that with the help of these control options, you can either enable, disable or restart any of the services that you will find available within the Manage Services. You can easily use the control option in order to purge the cache if you have finalized to clear the Varnish cache.

  • Settings & Packages

This section of the server helps you manage any of the basic to the advanced server-level settings and the packages. As far as the basic setting is concerned, it is required to increase or decrease the limit of the memory, upload size, and even the limit of execution.

When we talk about its advanced section, it is helpful for managing the MySQL and PHP settings. These packages are also great for upgrading or downgrading the PHP versions for the application. This means you can upgrade Redis Cache, MySQL and enable or disable Elasticsearch.

  • Security

The Cloudways security option is quite interesting, as it offers whistling and the block of the IP addresses for those who would be trying to access the server via SFTP or SSH. If you have any concerns about server security, then you will definitely find this feature to be very useful.

There are plenty of possibilities granted to you by Cloudways to obtain the MySQL database. These options include a web-based database manager, a remote connection that may need IP safe listing, and the SSH tunnel.

  • Vertical Scaling

Cloudways offer an on-demand vertical scaling, and you will find this particular feature to be one of its best because, without any trouble, this feature helps you to increase the size of the server.

You have to keep in mind that there is one issue with Vertical Scaling that your plan cannot be downgraded unless you create a new server. Therefore, when it is about Cloudways pricing, it is always recommended to go with a small plan, and after seeing your CPU as well as the RAM usage, you can decide on upgrading your server.

  • Backups

You will also find the backup features that are available with Cloudways, and these features can surely be great to keep your website safe. It is up to you to go for the entire server backup or choose the application-level backup feature. Cloudways gives you an option of setting the time for the scheduled backup with the help of a backup frequency. Another option available is enabling the local backup, and this can easily be downloaded through SFTP or SSH.

cloudways hosting

PC: Cloudways

Cloudways Application Management

  • The Access Details option

In Application Management, you will find the Access Details option to be quite an important section. This particular section allows you to get information regarding Admin Panel, Application URL, Public IP, and MySQL Access.

  • Monitoring

The monitoring section of Cloudways is further divided into two sections. The Analytics section is about traffic, running Cron jobs, MySQL, PHP, speed tests, and disk usage. When it is about PHP, you can monitor the processes running currently, slow pages, and the monitor requested pages.

The log section allows you to have access and the Error log. If you like to understand the web requests, viewed pages, user-agents, and the status of the recommendations, then analyzing the logs is very important to understand.

  • Domain Management

In this particular place, you can point the domain to the web app. It can either be a root domain or subdomain. It is worth noting that the basic use of domain management is to migrate a website from another host. You have the prospect to aim at the relocated site URL to the domain.

  • Cron Job Management

This scheduled job is able to function automatically at a certain time interval. This is a place wherein Cloudways you can assign from a starter to an advanced Cron Job. It may include taking a server backup, scheduling a post, or setting up a traffic record.

  • SSL Certificate

At the application level, free and paid SSL certificates are supported by Cloudways. With a particular click in the context, you can establish the free certificate. When it is about the custom certificate, you will be required to have Key content and CRT content. The free certificate is valid for a maximum of 90 days, whereas auto-renewal features can also be enabled in Cloudways.

  • Application settings

You will have three options available in the application settings, i.e., the General, Varnish, and PHP FPM settings. The application folder name can be renamed in the general settings, as well as you can enable or disable the CORS headers. The varnish settings help you to add any rules giving a chance to varnish to perform better at the application level. You can configure the basic to the advanced PHP settings in PHP FPM settings.

 

  • Different Migration Tools

There is a Cloudways WordPress Migrator plugin that can surely be helpful for the migration of the existing WordPress site to Cloudways. Therefore, you can download the plugin if you are unsatisfied with your present host and would like to migrate to Cloudways. There is another possibility that with the help of the Cloudways Migration Expert, you are able to claim a single free migration.

  • CloudwaysCDN

If you would like to reach your WordPress site on a global level at a cost that you may find appropriate, then CloudwaysCDN is surely the way to go. Partnering with StackPath, Cloudways offers you the CDN service.

For a price of $1, you can have a Cloudways CDN for 25 GB per single application, and if you would like to consume more, it will cost you around $0.04 per GB. It is worth noting that CloudwaysCDN is not compulsory, but it is optional, and therefore, you can go for any of the CDN services like BunnyCDN or Cloudflare to replace it.

cloudways pricing

PC: Cloudways

Cloudways Pricing and Plans

There are five different companies from which Cloudways gets its infrastructure. As Cloudways is a Pay As you Go service, therefore, you can choose any of the plans according to your needs. Digital Ocean is surely among the most popular and cheapest cloud providers that start from $10 a month. Another one is Linode, which has more than 11 data centers worldwide and starts with $12 a month.

Vultr is also quite popular and offers two plans, i.e., Standard and High frequency. The standard one starts with $11 a month, and the High-frequency plan begins with $13. AWS or Amazon web services are costly compared to other providers but is great for e-commerce business and agencies. It starts at around $36.51 per month. Google Cloud is the best for developers and e-commerce, and its starting price is $33.3 per month.

 

Bottom Line

Cloudways surely has great web-based customer support, fast setup times, superb uptime, and flexible hosting plans when it is about Cloudways pricing. In order to keep your site up and run to the services, Cloudways is surely the one you can count on. Although some people may not appreciate the odd method of having their customer service representative on the phone, one still has to give Cloudways a chance. In order to have your website online, you will surely come to know that it offers what you would like to have.

Also Read: Bluehost Slow

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