Cloudways is a popular name in managed PaaS industry. In just seven years, it has become one of the most affordable managed cloud hosting provider in the market today. Starting from very humble beginnings, Cloudways managed to acquire a staggering number of customers in a very short period of time.
To offer the best services to the customers, the Cloudways team brought the most popular and oft-requested tools on a single platform. In this review, we intend to explore the features of the platform that is ideal for a WordPress website.
Launching Application at the Cloudways Platform
To fully understand the features of the Cloudways platform, it is important to start from the very beginning. Right after creating my account on Cloudways, I launched my first WordPress application.
The first cool feature I came across was the pre-configured WordPress variants. These variants have a built-in set of tools required for a specific site. For instance, the WooCommerce application comes with the WooCommerce plugin and Varnish settings required for an online store.
After launching the application, I went straight to the dashboard where I found my master credentials and the quick link to launch the wp-admin of my WordPress site.
WordPress Performance Check
I launched WordPress version 4.9.2 that comes preinstalled with Breeze and Varnish.
I ran a few tests to discover the performance of the WordPress site hosted on the Cloudways platform.
Pingdom:
The results are pretty impressive. However, these results are about a site that has default theme and no real-world content.
Here is a run through some of the popular Cloudways features:
- Breeze
- Varnish
- Cloudways CDN
- Domain Management
- Migration
- Application Cloning
- Team Member Management
Breeze
Breeze is a WordPress cache management plugin developed by Cloudways. It’s an effective plugin that helps speed up WordPress sites. The good thing is that the plugin comes preinstalled with the WordPress version 4.9.2 option.
The plugin has advanced features that allow users to exclude the pages that you don’t want to be cached, combine JavaScript and CSS files and use Gzip compression.
Varnish
Varnish is another extremely fast cache mechanism that also comes preinstalled with WordPress version 4.9.2 option. Cloudways users can define custom Varnish rules inside the Application Settings from the Application dashboard.
CloudwaysCDN
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is used to deliver files to the end user from the nearest server. This improves the speed of the site as well as enhance user experience for all visitors (regardless of the location). CloudwaysCDN is extremely easy to set up and comes at great price of just $1 for 25GB per application.
To add CloudwaysCDN to your website, simply navigate to the CloudwaysCDN tab located right at the end of side menu and enter your website’s URL.
Domain Management
Managing domain and pointing it to your website is a fairly complex when done through the conventional cPanel. Realizing this, Cloudways has simplified this process so that a lay user could do it in easy steps. Let’s see how easy it is:
Open the Domain Management tab from the Application dashboard.
Add your primary domain in the field and click on SAVE CHANGES button. That’s it!
In case of a multisite, list additional domains under ADDITIONAL DOMAINS heading and follow the DNS-related step listed here.
WordPress Site Migration
Cloudways offers a convenient plugin for migrating your existing WordPress site to the Cloudways platform. It is very efficient and does not break your old site. Note that the migration process can take up to 30 minutes depending on the size of your WordPress site.
To access the plugin, go to Migration Tools tab and download the WordPress Migration plugin.
Application Cloning
This is one of my favorite Cloudways features, and if you are a developer you would probably love this too. Cloudways application cloning feature let you clone the whole application to another Cloudways server in just a single click! No need to take site backups or import MySQL scripts.
To set up application cloning, hover over the quick access tool menu located in the bottom right corner and click the Clone App option.
Select your target server and initiate the cloning process by clicking the SUBMIT button.
Add Team Members
Cloudways let you add team members to work on your application. This is a very important feature for agencies and developers who work with distributed teams. To add a team member, click the member icon located at the top right corner.
In the next window, define the permissions for your team member.
Cloudways Server Side Features
I would like to run through some key features of Cloudways server management. The platform automates complex server management tasks and simplifies both basic and advanced server-side features.
Here are some of the core features which I find extremely useful and convenient:
Top Cloud Providers
Large Data Centers
Vertical Scaling
Server Transfer and Cloning
Top Cloud Server Providers
Cloudways has partnered with six industry-leading cloud infrastructure providers:
- DigitalOcean
- Linode
- Vultr
- Amazon Web Services
- Google Cloud Platform
- Kyup
Choice of Data Centers
Because of its partnership with six cloud providers, Cloudways users could choose from a long list of data centers distributed around the world. While launching the server, you can select the nearest datacenter to your target audience.
Vertical Scaling
One of the great feature that Cloudways offer is vertical server scaling. It can be done from Server dashboard under Vertical Scaling tab.
Here you can choose any available size by moving the range pointer and click the SCALE NOW button to save your settings. Your server size will upgrade or downgrade almost instantly.
Server Transfer and Cloning
Cloudways users can transfer and clone their servers to another Cloudways account in just a click. Both the options can be found inside the Quick Access tool menu located at the bottom right corner.
This feature conveniently transfers server configuration to another server.
Final Test Score
To test my WordPress website in real-world conditions, I decided to upload 20 high resolution images and 45 posts. Following are the results:
Pingdom:
As you can see, the numbers are good enough to ensure that the WordPress website is able to function well in real world.
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