Cloudways Full Review
Cloudways is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider that helps to solve all the challenges with installing and managing websites and applications on a cloud server. It provides you with an options you to install most of the popular applications like WordPress, WooCommerce, PHP, Laraval and more with just a few clicks. Cloudways gives you an opportunity to choose your cloud hosting services from any 3 industry leaders: DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, and many more. The service is quite affordable, you can customize the server according to your requirements and scale it up as needed. The technologies used on the site include HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery and Laravel. The platform is built on AngularJS.
Cloudways doesn't work like most of the web hosts you come across. Cloudways lets you choose which cloud hosting provider you use. For example, currently you can use Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, Amazon AWS, or Google Cloud. Cloudways has its own managed platform, so you can deploy servers and deploy any application in minutes. And you will have extensive support if you encounter any problems. The advantage of this approach is that you can get scalable, high-performance hosting without paying the exorbitant price that some managed platforms charge.
Cloudways has server-level caching (Memcache + Varnish) with the ability to set up Redis caching - which is worth doing because it will improve performance. WordPress installations come with their own internal caching plugin called Breeze, so you don't need any additional caching plugins - it goes beyond caching and handles CDN integration, minification, and more.
What about security? Cloudways has built-in firewalls and is actively patching servers to protect against vulnerabilities. IP whitelisting allows you to block all other IP addresses that might be trying to access your server via SSH or SFTP if it is not whitelisted. There is also built-in database security and two-factor authentication to protect account login. And you can install SSL for free through Let's Encrypt through their control panel. You can set automatic renewals and renew your SSL sooner if you want. Optionally, you can install your own SSL certificate.
Self-healing servers and enough control to fix most problems on your own. Most managed hosts do not give you control over certain features like PHP processes or caching. With Cloudways, they run self-healing servers. Therefore, if your server crashes, it will reboot and this will help solve most of the problems. And you have access to the processes running on your server, so you can restart them whenever you need to without contacting support.
Most web hosts create backups for you, but sometimes it can be difficult to know when they were taken. And recovering is also not always easy. This is a problem because if you make changes to your site, you may not know how much you will lose. Cloudways lets you choose when and how often your backups run. You will know exactly what is going on if you need to restore them.
With the Cloudways platform you get enough control to solve most problems yourself, and the opportunity to scale server resources. Support is available through email and live chat with minimal latency. There is also an extensive knowledge base and community support forums. Or, if you run a web development agency or company and need the ability to assign specific servers to different users, isolated websites for security purposes, and the ability to quickly grow servers, Cloudways is great for your needs. It takes more learning time to master the platform, but that's natural because you have more features at your fingertips. For example, server logs, traffic logs, the ability to restart processes, custom backups, staging site creation, and more.
Here's the bottom line: Cloudways offers high performance web hosting at a much more affordable price than most web hosts. If you are thinking of upgrading your hosting, try Cloudways. Ultimately, what you think matters. And Cloudways is one of the few web hosts offering a free trial, so give them a try and see what you think.
