Hosting is one of the essential ingredients that helps you to grow your online business. We have numerous hosting options out there, but choosing the right one is a complicated process.
Considering that, in this article, we are going to help you choose the right hosting and discuss a number of factors that you need to consider before choosing any hosting such as performance, security, reliability, and price, etc.
We have researched and found a hosting platform that fulfills your website needs and lets you focus on your business instead. We will cover an in-depth overview of Cloudways, one of the industry-leading managed cloud hosting platforms.
Cloudways: Managed WordPress Hosting
Cloudways is a fully managed WordPress hosting platform that offers compelling features through which you can easily manage your servers and applications. Cloudways is partnered with industry-leading cloud infrastructure providers (DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform) and their platform works as a middle man between users and cloud infrastructure providers.
Features of Cloudways
Let’s take a closer look at the Cloudways features that play a significant role in your website and online business to expand and generate more profit.
1. Performance
Cloudways provides a unique value proposition where they manage and give control over core services such as Apache, NGINX, and Varnish, etc., from your server dashboard. These services help you improve your site performance and let you boost your site’s speed as well. Their LAMP (Linux, Apache, Maria DB & PHP) stack comes with NGINX as a reverse proxy which produces high performing results.
Most hosting providers (shared, managed, and dedicated) use LAMP or LEMP (Linux, NGINX, Maria DB, PHP) stack but here you’ll find a combination of both stacks with additional performance catalysts such as Varnish, Memcached, and many more.
2. Security
Web security is a serious topic, and maintaining it is one of the biggest challenges for hosting providers. But Cloudways makes this process easy and provides you different security layers to secure your server at all levels. Let’s take a brief look at its security layers and features that it offers.
- Dedicated Security Firewall: This security wall allows access to only specific ports (only required ports).
- Login Layer: Brute-force login attack is a common security threat that you’ll find in web hosting. To tackle this problem, Cloudways offers an SSH/SFTP login method.
- Manage IP: You can manage your security settings from Cloudways dashboard where you can whitelist your IPs for login and database access.
- 2FA: Two-factor authentication is a great way to make it difficult for an attacker or unauthorized user to access your account.
- SSL Certificates: Cloudways offers free SSL certificates for your web application.
There are many more security features, but let’s move on.
3. Scalability
Scalability is an essential factor that helps any business or website to grow and expand with their needs. Cloudways provides a highly scalable platform; it lets you scale up your server size quickly and takes a few clicks to scale all the resources (within a minute). You’ll find this option on your Server Management Dashboard > Vertical Scaling. For instance, if your website is growing or you’re looking for a bigger server, you can quickly increase your server size using a slider.
4. Reliability
Reliability is also an important factor that you need to consider before choosing a web hosting. Cloudways has five cloud infrastructure partners and they have data centers in more than 60 global locations that help you choose a server based on your targeted audience. That’s why you’ll find that the managed cloud hosting is more reliable as compared to other hosting solutions (Shared or VPS, etc.).
5. Ease of Use
One of the reasons why we’d recommend Cloudways is because of its simplified and intuitive platform where you can easily manage your servers as well as applications from the Dashboards. You’ll find two separate Dashboards in the platform; server management and application management.
Let’s take a brief look at Cloudways Management Dashboards.
Server Management
It consists of several sections and each section has a particular role and purpose. You’ll find all server related settings, configurations, and functions on this Dashboard.
- Master Credentials: Here, you’ll find your server access credentials (Server IP, Server Username, and Server Password). You can also launch your server terminal from this section and all you need to do is click on Launch SSH terminal.
- Monitoring: You can check and monitor your server’s health.
- Manage Services: You can manage your server core services like Apache, NGINX, Varnish, etc.
- Settings and Packages: You can control the versions (PHP and MySQL), upload size limit, execution time and much more from this section.
- Security: You can whitelist your IPs for the SFTP login and Database connection.
- Vertical Scaling: You can increase your server size.
- Backups: You can schedule and manage your backups. Also, you can take an on-demand backup of your server from this section.
- SMTP: You can set up outgoing email delivery.
Application Management
It comprises several tabs and each tab serves different application-level operations. Let’s explore them.
- Access Details: You’ll see the application login credentials, application URL, and database access credentials on this screen.
- Monitoring: You can monitor traffic stats, track PHP performance, database stats, Cron Jobs, disk consumption, access logs, and error logs of your web application.
- Domain Management: You can quickly point your Domain to your web application. Also, you can add additional domains and subdomains
- Cron Job Management: You can schedule a command or script on your application to automate repetitive tasks. In short, you can create and manage cron jobs from this section.
- SSL Certificate: You can install a free SSL certificate on your web application and also deploy a paid certificate if you have any.
- Backup and Restore: You can backup and restore your web application.
- Deployment via Git: You can also deploy your code via Git.
- Application Settings: You can configure your application-level settings that include HTTPS redirect, Varnish settings, and PHP FPM settings, etc.
- Migration Tools: You can migrate your WordPress site for free with the Cloudways Migration plugin.
- CloudwaysCDN: You have free CloudwaysCDN that lets you boost your site’s speed.
You can see how Cloudways has simplified the hosting process and provides a hassle-free experience for its users.
6. Price and Plans
We always prefer affordable and feature-rich hosting providers for our website. When it comes to Cloudways, no managed cloud hosting platforms offer such a reasonable price (starting at $10 and goes up to hundreds of dollars) for all the features mentioned earlier.
Final Words!
We hope this article helped you choose the right hosting provider for your online business or website. So now you know why we recommend reliable hosting providers like Cloudways to our users and consider it the best-managed cloud hosting. We’ve discussed the six essential factors of Cloudways that help any business/website to grow and expand and how it fulfills your web requirements.
Cloudways offers a three-day free trial (without a credit card)! So give it a try and check out its features and share your experience in the comment below.