Hello Marketers
Today I wanted to talk to you about WordPress hosting & how I found the web host of my dreams, Cloudways.
Are you sick and tired of having hosting problems either that be having your site held by ransom, the support is useless, asking you to pay more & not supporting the current standards. well, this review is for you.
My Story Why I Wanted To Move Hosting Providers:
For the last 10 years I had had my sites hosted with Godaddy, and before all the hosting geeks go “pufhhh” the reason I picked go daddy that far back was because of the price and the spec (at the time).
in that 10 years, I have grown and had lots of different problems, that had to be sorted by my self because the support was useless, but hey I thought well that’s what I get for that price. but one day that changed. I started to see that my Godaddy bill kept going up every couple of months.
One day I just Snapped
I was on my website and it was pretty slow and I realise I am not on Php 7.0, so I want over to my Godaddy custom Cpanel and see that I can’t upgrade to 7.0 and I am stuck on 5.6. I asked Godaddy why and they simply said that my type of hosting account was discontinued and that the Cpanel is not kept up to date anymore and that if I wanted 7.0 PHP or future upgrades, even though the price they were charging me was still increasing. I would have to migrate or pay them £160 to migrate for me. This was absolute ridicules as 7.0 is the current Php standard and I have been with them for 10 years. NO Mention, until I said something, not even an email.
Even after a crap rebrand this company has done nothing but get worse and worse in the 10 years I have had a hosting account with them.
It especially scares me when they buy great WordPress plugins like Sucuri and ManageWP. We are yet to see them be ruined by Godaddy, but time will tell.
On The Road Again Looking For A Good Hosting Provider:
So I was on the road again looking for a good hosting provider that would cover some criteria, let me explain.
Must Haves:
- They had to have good support
- They had to be great value for money
- Had the right standards like Php 7.0 etc
Other bonuses:
- They have a fast speed
- Their support understands WordPress
- Easy migration Process
- Little to none restrictions limits
And Finally ladies and gentlemen I have found the hosting provider of my dreams.
Here’s What I Found:
Cloudways Cloud Hosting:
Introducing Cloudways a cloud hosting service that runs like a dream there managed hosting platform gives digital agencies and e-commerce businesses flexibility and choice in how websites are hosted. Backed by 24/7/365 support.
How do Cloud ways work:
So simply put cloud hosting is when a company runs your WordPress install on the cloud inserted of a normal shared server. what’s the difference well on the cloud as the structure is a lot more organised you can do things a lot easier than before, for example, Pay as you go billing, scaling up or down your resources when you need or staging.
With Cloudways, they act as a middle man between you and the cloud hosting provider that manages the cloud server for you allowing you to do tasks more quickly.
On Cloudways you can choice from 5 different cloud providers. at the time of writing these consist of
- Digital Ocean
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- Linode
- Vultr
On Cloudways you get Unlimited Applications with All PHP Apps Supported
Support Experience:
as far as Experience goes the 24/7/365 Support is great and helpful with a good understanding of a lot of PHP apps, not just WordPress. you get full Managed Security & Automated Backups with 24/7 Real-time Monitoring.
Performance That Scales:
You get an Optimised Stack with a built-in CDN for no extra charge,
Auto-Healing & PHP 7 Ready Servers.
Security is great with a Dedicated Firewalls, 1-Click Free SSL Installation, Regular Security Patching & Two-Factor Authentication.
My Main Loves about Cloudways:
There are so many different things I could talk about in this review because these guys seem to have thought about everything & hosting can become a geekfest, so I want to cover my Favourites.
1. Great Value & Transparent Pricing:
The pricing plans at Cloudways work for everyone & scale when you need to grow. pay as you go billing makes it easy and you only pay for the resources you consume. You can choose from 5 different cloud providers that range in price from affordable to higher priced.
For example:
if you get a package with Digital Ocean for only a $10 a month you will get
- RAM 1GB
- 1 Processor Core
- Storage 25GB
- 1 TB Bandwidth
and all plans come with:
- 24/7/365 Support
- Free SSL
- CDN Add-on
- Free Migration
- Unlimited Application Installation
- Team Management
- Dedicated Firewalls
- 24/7 Real-time Monitoring
- Automated Backups
- Staging Environment
- Optimised With Advanced Caches
- Auto Healing
- Regular Security Patching
- HTTP/2 Enabled Servers
- SSH and SFTP Access
For $10 a month that is great value in the hosting world with little limitations.
Its also worth mentioning the Unlimited Applications with All PHP Apps Supported, so that if you have one website and want to set up another one you can without the hosting company telling you, you can’t.
Free Migration:
This is rare to see in the hosting world a hosting company that offers one free migration with little to no limitations (includes WP Multisite’s). I personally tried the migration service on this WordPress site and it was so easy and everything was done correctly and in a quick time frame.
Staging Environment:
This means you can have a dev site that you make changes too and it will not go live until you are ready. This makes it easy to run a dev site without the maintenance of both sites. I personally tried the staging feature and it was so easy and everything worked.
Free SSL & CDN Add-on:
This is a great add-on keeping your site secure with an SSL and fast with a CDN.
2. Innovative Control Panel:
Cloudways Control Panel is awesome with everything laid out correctly in an easy to use way, unlike other control panels.
Server:
You can control your
- SMTP for the server
- Monitor your servers stats
- What packages you are running on the server
- All your server limits displayed nicely and editable
- Your Security settings for SFTP or MySQL
- Backups
- And more
Apps:
You can control your
- Domain Control for the app
- Monitoring of the site
- All-access controls & details
- Cron Job Management
- SSL Certificate settings
- Backups & Restores
- App Settings
- CDN Settings
Everything is laid out in a nice and simple way and nothing is hidden.
3. CloudwaysBot:
The CloudwaysBot, is your very own server assistant. An intelligently designed to keep a close eye on your Cloudways hosting account and notify you about alerts for your Servers, Applications, Security, Billing and overall performance.
Along with that, it will also be sending you different recommendations, tips and tricks on how to improve the performance of the server.
So that’s a short review of my new favourite hosting provider Cloudways.
If you are looking for a new hosting provider Cloudways is a great change and well worth the move.
If you have any comments about your experience with Cloudways please share in the comments below.
