What Is Cloudways? Overview & Tour Of Features
Hosting is one of the vital industries underpinning the digital world. During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we witnessed a massive surge in the ecommerce industry and, of course, the hosting industry played a crucial role in supporting the increased website traffic.
Among a bunch of names in the hosting industry, Cloudways is one that has been offering a managed cloud hosting solution for a decade now. Last year, Cloudways broke its previous records of active servers, unlocked bigger achievements, and also expanded its global team.
So, this article is about Cloudways services, how we support applications, and how you can deploy your application on Cloudways.
Cloudways - a Managed Cloud Hosting Solution
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting solution for all PHP-based applications like Magento, WordPress, Laravel, and others.
Cloudways started back in 2010 in Mosta, Malta. The idea was to help other businesses to grow and win together. Later on, the product grew and is still growing with the latest stack to tackle the latest challenges. Cloudways is ranked at #2 on G2 in the Managed Hosting category for Winter 2021.
Our Target Audience
We are the ideal solution for eCommerce, SMBs, agencies, and developers. We leverage the customer to deploy your Magento, WordPress, or any PHP-based application within a few minutes without having any technical knowledge.
What Challenges Does Cloudways Solve?
Managing a server isn’t easy. We remove the hassle of managing the server with pre-installed services that are required to run any application smoothly.
Customers have the freedom to choose their servers. We offer the top 5 cloud providers, including DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform. All the cloud providers are top-notch and come with data server locations which make the user pick one as per their traffic audiences and pricing option.
On top of that, we also offer the option to scale the server at any time without any prior notice. This feature becomes really handy during seasonal campaigns like BFCM, Christmas, etc.
Cloudways Features Overview
Now, it’s time to look at the main Cloudways features that support Magento and other PHP-based applications for optimum performance.
1. Cloudways Thunderstack
We offer the latest server resources that are required for Magento applications to run without any glitches. The hosting stack consists of Apache & NGINX that serve as an HTTP. Varnish, Redis, and Memcached take care of the entire website optimization. For OS independence you have the option to choose among various PHP versions (5.6 - 8.0).
Last, Elasticsearch is also enabled which is the mandatory resource for Magento applications
2. Ironclad Security
Cloudways uses best practices to ensure all the Magento applications that have been deployed on the server are secured and protected. The Cloudways team runs security patches on the server, partnered with Securi, Cloudflare, and Stackpatch for WAF and other security protection concerns.
On top of that, Cloudways is also partnered with Let’s Encrypt allowing free SSL integration for every Magento application. Besides, you can also use the feature of IP whitelisting to restrict or allow the IPs for SSH/SFTP or database.
3. Staging Environment
Once your Magento application is ready to go live, you can pre-ensure all functionalities of the website by creating a staging URL.
4. Server Monitoring
Being a developer or business owner, you will always be kept updated with the performance of your server and application. This way, you will always be able to keep track of your resource consumption.
Cloudways offers a separate dashboard for application and server monitoring.
5. Deploy Magento Application with Ease
The entire Cloudways dashboard is simple and really easy to use. Anyone can host Magento application by following the steps below:
Step #1: First, you need to choose the Magento application, name the application and server.
Step #2: Choose among the top 5 cloud providers.
Step #3: Select the server size as per your Magento application requirement.
Step #4: Pick up a server location and ensure it’s near to your targeted audience.
Step #5: Hit the launch button and your fresh Magento application will be ready in a few minutes with managed server resources.
Cloudways vs Other Competitors
Since we are a managed cloud hosting solution provider, we allow users to choose from top cloud providers like DO, Linode, Vultr, AWS and Google Cloud Platform with the managed stack. We also allow users to deploy unlimited Magento applications on a single server. Therefore, we stand out among other hosting competitors.
Cloudways Integrations
Cloudways partners with world-class technology providers to offer a seamless service. The account owner has a choice of multiple integrations with Cloudways. For instance:
New Relic
Customers are allowed to integrate New Relic in order to attain a more in-depth analysis of the server performance.
SMTP
Customers can choose between different emailing services like Elastic Email or other third-party providers like Mailgun, Mandrill, AuthSMTP, SendGrid, etc.
Cloudways CDN
You have an option to give an extra boost to your Magento application by setting up CloudwaysCDN and making your application load faster. We have partnered with Cloudflare to provide flawless CDN service.
Cloudways Pricing
Cloudways offers a Pay-As-You-Go pricing model which means you only pay for the resources that you utilize. The recommended hosting plan for Magento starts with 4GBs of RAM.
Wrapping Up!
Cloudways is the ultimate choice for the heavy-resource Magento application. Just to get started, you can avail a free 3-day trial using DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr servers to explore the platform.
If you have queries regarding the platform, feel free to mention them in the comments section.
Related Read: 11 Ecommerce Expert’s Post-Pandemic Predictions
