Cloudways Review

WooCommerce is a popular choice when it comes to setting up any online business. It is easy to set up and a huge collection of extensions enables the users to add or extend any storefront feature with ease. Although getting started with WooCommerce is easy, the users often find it challenging to keep their store running smoothly.

Among these challenges, finding the right web hosting solution for the WooCommerce store could become a deal-breaker because many users do not consider the hosting requirements at the beginning. Thus, as their store grows, running the online store on a mediocre and unoptimized hosting could disrupt business operations.

In this article, I will address this issue by first looking at the benefits of a managed solution for hosting WooCommerce sites, and then give you Cloudways review, one of the top managed WooCommerce hosting providers.     

Why Managed Cloud Hosting is Important for WooCommerce?

Although you can use any type of web hosting to host a WooCommerce store, not all options out there offer the performance and reliability required for the best user experience. In my opinion, a managed cloud hosting solution is really the best bet for a WooCommerce store. 

Here’s why:

Performance

Performance is vital for the smooth operation of your online business. You can build the best- looking store and have great products to sell. However, all of this would go down the drain if your store does not provide the user experience visitors expect from an online store. 

Cloud hosting service ensures performance through the latest hardware and software infrastructure built on the latest OS, upgraded web servers, databases, and related components that contribute to overall performance.   

Security

Security is an ongoing challenge for WooCommerce store owners. It is vital to secure a WooCommerce store from both external and internal threats to protect sensitive customer data.

Security is built into the core of managed cloud hosting solutions. Unlike shared hosting where a single server is shared among multiple websites, a cloud server offers isolation and has added security in place to counter cyberattacks such as brute force logins, DDoS, bot attacks, etc.

Reliability

Reliability is often overlooked by WooCommerce store owners, and thus they end up paying a heavy price. Reliability comes with high availability of server resources which managed cloud hosting understands really well. 

Managed cloud hosting ensures reliability through a robust network of servers that shares load efficiently and kicks in additional computing power when needed. This mechanism is unavailable in conventional shared hosting services.    

Cloudways hosting – A Reliable Solution For Hosting WooCommerce Stores

Cloudways is a managed WooCommerce hosting platform that is trusted by over 80,000 online store owners. With Cloudways, you can host your WooCommerce store on any top five IaaS providers including Google Cloud, AWS, Linode, Vultr, and DigitalOcean at a click of a button.

The Cloudways intuitive platform comes with useful features that allow you to manage complex tasks conveniently. Let’s explore Cloudways further by looking at the core offerings.     

Performance

Performance plays an integral part in the success of any website. In addition to great user experience, the performance of the website is an important requirement for higher SERP rankings. Being a managed WooCommerce hosting platform, Cloudways has a custom-built state-of-the-art stack for optimum performance.

Cloudways uses a combination of Apache and NGINX as web-servers and MariaDB for the database. This stack also contains a powerful caching mechanism comprising of Redis (for database caching), Varnish (as a reverse-proxy), and Memcached. It also uses PHP-FPM for improving the overall performance and enhanced performance of the managed hosting solution. 

Besides its powerful stack, all Cloudways managed servers run on the latest OS, SSD hard drives, and latest PHP version for enhanced performance and compatibility.       

Security

A secure WooCommerce store increases the brand reputation and thus the revenue generated by the store. Cloudways has invested heavily in securing its infrastructure with sophisticated measures that protect your managed server and online stores from a wide range of cyberattacks.

The web requests are filtered through a firewall while fail2ban protects your site from notorious brute force attacks. Cloudways also gives you the option of whitelisting the IP addresses (by default all IPs are blacklisted) to minimize unwanted server access by restricting SSH and SFTP access only to whitelisted IP.

Recently, Cloudways in partnership with MalCare introduced Bot Protection. With this feature, Cloudwayd customers can now monitor and block malicious bot traffic to protect server resources.  

Scalability

You never know when you need to scale server resources to meet the requirements of your growing online store. Scaling server resources could get painful if you are not on a managed WooCommerce hosting like Cloudways. In worse cases, scaling might require you to migrate to a new server with increased specifications.

Cloudways makes scaling as simple as moving a slider. You can scale your server in minutes without switching to a new server or changing your plan.

As shown above, server resources are simply added by dragging the slider to the required size. This saves hours of work and hassle involved in manually scaling server resources. 

Feature-rich Platform

Cloudways is known for its user-friendly feature-rich platform that takes away server management hassle and empowers the users to accomplish more in less time. Their team actively monitors the requirements from customers and frequently adds new features to the platform.

I will only cover the most popular features below. You can find out the full complement of the features yourself by signing up for the 3-day free trial.   

Choice of Infrastructure Providers

Unlike some managed cloud hosting solutions out there, Cloudways gives the customers the option of launching a server from the top five cloud providers. Not only that, but the users can also even pick the server specifications and a server location from 60+ data centers across the globe.

In short, you can launch a WooCommerce store on your preferred cloud provider in a few minutes. 

Server Management

Although Cloudways manages the server for its customers; it also gives control to manage various settings on their server to make sure that the server remains a viable business platform. 

Server Management options include credentials for SSH and SFTP access, server monitoring with detailed reports on CPU usage, storage, etc. Service Management that lets you start and stop the web servers, database, Varnish, etc.

Other settings include security features like IP Whitelisting, vertical scaling, and Backup Management that allows the user to set the frequency of auto-backups and manage off-site backups. 

Application Management

You can also manage each website individually through Application Management.

This section of the platform contains many useful options to help you manage your WooCommerce store. Inside monitoring, you can get a detailed report about traffic, PHP requests, database queries, and error logs.

Here, you can also manage your domain, SSL certificate, and CloudwaysCDN. Cloudways also has an extensive staging feature in place in which you can create a staging of your live WooCommerce store and also do table selection while PULLING or PUSHING the code.

In case you are developing a store for a client, you can easily clone it from your server to your client’s server on a click of a button.  

Team Members

If you are an agency or have multiple people working on your WooCommerce store, this feature can help you grant limited access to the server.

You can add as many team members as you like and control their level of access conveniently. Team Members feature can help you manage your team and developers without compromising server security. 

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, Cloudways does not bound its customers into any contracts. In fact, with the Cloudways Pay-As-You-Go model, customers control their hosting expenses.

The pricing starts as low as $10/mo for which you get a 1GB, 1 Core, 25GB server from DigitalOcean, a pretty decent place to start a new WooCommerce store that you can easily scale as the business heats up. grows. 

The competition: Cloudways vs SiteGround

SiteGround is one of the biggest competitors of Cloudways. Each of them comes with different pros and cons. But here we compare them based on some basic aspects. Let’s explore.

• Speed: The load time SiteGround offers cannot be as fast as Cloudways. Quite a few tests have proved what we said. Using SiteGround, one blog page takes 1.1 s to load. Meanwhile, the time is only 798 ms when it is hosted on Cloudways. If possible, you can test the load time on the two hostings with Pingdom Website Speed Test.
• Pricing: In terms of pricing, SiteGround is cheaper than Cloudways. Particularly, Cloudways offers the monthly price from $10 while you can use SiteGround from only $6.99.
• Ease of setting up: SiteGound requires less technical knowledge than Cloudways. Therefore, if you are not really confident in your technical aspects, you can choose to use SiteGround. In case you still love Cloudways’ features, it may take you more time to learn about it.

Final Thoughts on Cloudways Review

Investing in a managed WooCommerce hosting like Cloudways improves the performance of your WooCommerce store which can help you convert more visitors. The feature-rich platform makes the store management easier that saves you leaves you with more time you can spend on running and expanding your business.    

Finally, if you want to purchase Cloudways, let’s type this coupon code “WOOSTIFY” when you make payment. It will save you 20% off for 2 months.