Cloudways

Overview

With so many hosting options in the market today, it is easy to lose a hang of all the technical details that each brings alongside itself. Amidst them are cloud-based web hosting giants that, unlike the traditional hosting provide a platform to create virtual machines that are capable of hosting sites, apps, and more. That is exactly what Cloudways does; it acts as a hub of services where users are able to manage cloud services powered by Amazon, Google Cloud Platform, Linode, VULTR, and DigitalOcean. In other words, it provides a layer of abstraction for users looking to set up and run a scalable server with quick and simple deployment.

About Cloudways

Cloudways was conceptualized in 2009 by its first founders Pere Hospital, Aaqib Gadit, and Uzair Gadit who were enthusiastic on cloud-based hosting that was novel at the time. They set their headquarters on Malta Island in Europe from where they expanded to Spain and then later to UAE. Today, Cloudways powers approximately 12,000 servers and over 25,000 web apps in 43 different countries. The company works with five major cloud providers, supports PHP apps, and provides an innovative control panel to manage services with ease. With it, you can use several content management systems including WordPress, Drupal, Moodle, Magento, and Joomla. For PHP-based CMSs, customers are required to configure everything from scratch with ability to obtain any number of servers while at it. Actually, it is the only do-it-yourself service offered by the company.

How to Get Started With Cloudways

Since Cloudways only focuses on managed hosting, customers rarely handle web maintenance functionalities. These are instead done by the company which compares to web host providers that offer Virtual Private Servers alone.

To get started, Cloudways allows for creation of free-trial account that expires in 3 days. You can choose to sign up using GitHub, LinkedIn, or a valid email address and password.

On successful login into your account, the interface tasks you with the choice of several content management systems (CMS) ranging from Magento, Laravel, SugarCRM, Media Wiki, PHP Stack, WordPress, to PrestaShop. The choices are in plenty and mostly from popular, well-respected sources. Moving on, Cloudways allows you to build the site atop accredited infrastructures such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and VULTR. From there, you can pick any of multiple choice of server locations available which suit well your business needs. If within the 3-day trial period the services and experience are appealing, you can go ahead and choose the paid Cloudways Cloud Hosting Plans which we’ll review shortly. But first…

What Differentiates Cloudways From Other Traditional Hosts?

• As a cloud-based firm, all the sites hosted on it dwell on multiple servers. In traditional hosting, your site will mostly be stored on a single server with an on offsite backup plan.

• Migration is quick and easy since the site sits on multiple servers. Traditionally, you might be required to have an offline copy of the site to move it successfully.

• The servers at Cloudways automatically detect the location of the visitors to your site and relay content using the nearest network node. (CDN technology).

• Unless communicated in advance, sites hosted on Cloudways rarely have downtimes as any of the multiple servers available can instantly take over in case of failure of one.

• Server scaling is inherent meaning a sudden spike in volume of traffic to your site is handled efficiently and smoothly.

• Cloudways gives you more control over the hosting bill, allowing a 3-day trial period to test their cloud services.

• All the data resides on SSD storage which is faster and less prone to data corruption or damage.