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Starting a blog can be very challenging if you don’t have the right tools.
Trust me, I know this from first-hand experience.
And one of the main things that you have to focus on when you’re starting is finding an amazing hosting provider.
Through this process, you may find that you will end up switching hosting providers along the way.
That’s completely normal and it is almost expected on this wonderful blogging journey.
So why not try to start with a great hosting provider that you can stick with throughout this entire journey?
This is where Cloudways comes in.
Today, I’m going to share with you why Cloudways is an amazing platform for both beginners and experts, and why it will be the only hosting provider that you will ever need.
What is Cloudways?
Before we begin, you may be wondering, what in the world is Cloudways?
Cloudways is a managed cloud-based hosting service provider.
They help you manage your site in PHP-based Applications such as WordPress and also connect you to other service providers that will take care of your servers.
And if you know anything about Cloud hosting then you know that it is one of the most reliable web hosting services that you can get.
You can read all about cloud hosting in this article.
Not only will they help you manage your website or applications, but they’ll make it super easy for you to create your own servers and adjust and scale as needed. All from the dashboard.
It’s most well known for its managed WordPress website hosting. So if you are a WordPress user, then Cloudways will be perfect for you.
It removes the hassle of having to be an expert in order to manage a server. While at the same time still giving you the possibility to manage and create your own servers for your own applications.
This may sound a bit intimidating to beginners, but it is actually very easy to set up. Take it from someone who’s only done shared hosting in the past.
This migration process and creation of my server on Cloudways were super fast and simple. But we’ll talk more about that a bit further in this post.
Is Cloudways Fast?
If you’re looking for a fast hosting provider, then Cloudways is definitely going to be perfect for you.
When I say there’s almost no downtime, I mean, there is no downtime.
Cloudways is known to have an uptime of 99.99%. Meaning it will almost always be up and working, no matter the influx of visitors you have on your site.
Using Bing because it works with amazing server providers like AWS Vultr, Digital Ocean, and Google Cloud.
And let’s not forget that cloud hosting is one of the fasting hosting providers that you can get.
But there is also some accountability that needs to be taken on your own part as a website owner. Cloudways can only do so much, but you have to make sure that your website is also optimized for speed.
This means buying the right server space on the Cloudways platform to make sure that your site is not too heavy for your server.
And also having themes and applications that are optimized for speed.
Is Cloudways Good for WordPress?
Cloudways is by far one of the best hosting providers that you can get if you have a WordPress website.
Cloudways can automate all of your website tasks via WordPress, and it even has a great plugin called Breeze that also helps to optimize your website, minify your images, and fix load seeds.
Not to mention it also has things like lazy-load.
But that’s not all.
Cloudways has a dedicated Managed WordPress hosting service that is specifically designed for WordPress websites.
Allowing you to tailor your servers to your website needs.
And did I mention that it does all of this at the fraction of the cost?
But we’ll get more into the pricing later.
Is Cloudways Faster than SiteGround?
Short answer, yes.
Long answer, Cloudways actually trust themselves so much that they did the testing for us.
They took the data from G2 and compared Cloudways to other major sites like Kinsta, SiteGround, and WP Engine.
You can see in this comparison that Cloudways perform significantly better than at SiteGround counterpart.
So Cloudways easily outscores SiteGround and ease of use, quality of setup, and support.
Personally, I’ve used SiteGround in the past and one of the things that annoyed me the most was the fact that they had a cap on how much traffic you can get per month.
For the base price, if you get more than 10,000 visitors to your website, you’re going to have to bump up your subscription.
I personally do not like any hosting provider that puts a cap on how much traffic I can get. Mainly because if you’ve ever owned a website, you know how much your site can fluctuate from one month to another.
And the fact that I’d have to put an extra price tag on my hosting just because I happen to get an extra influx of traffic that particular day doesn’t sit well with me.
But to each his own.
7 Reasons Why Cloudways is a Great Choice
Now that we’ve gotten into some of the major external details as to why making the switch to Cloudways would be beneficial for you, let’s get into more of the details of why Cloudways is such a great choice.
1. Cloudways Managed WordPress Hosting
Managed WordPress hosting is one of the best hosting services that you can get if you have a WordPress website.
This type of service will always apply the most powerful technologies to your WordPress website to make sure that it’s always optimized and updated.
It will also make sure that it always applies the right security measures to keep your site secure and safe.
This is something that can be a real headache sometimes if you’re a beginner and trying to run your own server. This is why people tend to go to other hosting providers that have shared hosting platforms or Managed WordPress hosting services.
This is where Cloudways really shines.
They manage your backups, your security checkups, and anything else that you need for your server.
But of course, you’re the boss, so you’re in charge.
You can set all of this up manually or automatically, depending on your needs. It even gives you the possibility to clone your website and make a staging site that you will be able to work on offline and then upload the changes when you’re ready.
These are things that you generally have to pay an extra fee for with other service providers, but Cloudways gives you all of this in its monthly fee.
2. Cloudways Hosting Pricing
One of the absolute best features about Cloudways has to be its pricing.
Not only is it cheaper than a lot of its major counterparts but it also has more flexibility in its pricing plans.
It is the only major cloud hosting and WordPress-managed hosting provider that allows you to pay on a month-to-month basis.
They even have a pay-as-you-go plan that allows you to pay only for what you consumed.
Hosting on the platform can start as low as $10 a month.
Yeah, you read that right.
$10 a month is a steal when you think of the fact that for 12 months, you’ll be paying maybe $120 for the entire year.
For the quality of service that you get and the ease of accessibility, $10 a month is an absolute steal.
But of course, there are different tiers that you can choose, so if you want more server space, you can pay more.
You can also choose to go with more expensive servers like Google Cloud and AWS, whose plans can start from the $60 mark and upwards.
But for any regular small business website or blog, a simple $10 to $12 Server with about 2 gigabytes of space will be more than enough.
Cloudways Pay-as-you-go Plans
The pay-as-you-go plan is great if you’re someone who is just testing out different applications at different times.
Or if you’re somebody who runs certain campaigns for certain periods of time.
If you feel like binding yourself to a one-month hosting plan is just too much for you and you only need it for a few days, then choosing the pay-as-you-go plan will be perfect for you.
You can pay for exactly the server space that you use and get it billed to you at the end of that period.
You can pause the plan as needed and if you want to reuse it in the future, you can simply start it up again.
3. Staging and Backups
As a site owner myself, the importance of staging and backups is something that I do not feel is stressed enough.
When it comes to staging, being able to test things on a clone of your website that is completely offline before making it public is an amazing feature.
This is why I now only pay for hosting providers that have staging as a part of the hosting plan.
So when I found out that Cloudways not only has staging but also has backups for your website that you can plan automatically, I knew that I was making the right decision.
Having backups are just as important, if not more important than having a staging environment.
If something goes wrong with your website or you’re testing a new feature, the easiest way to be able to save your website is to restore an old backup.
Things can happen that can sometimes be out of our control. And even though I recommend you do any new testing on your on your staging before you make it public, there may still be some hiccups once the site is online.
So knowing that you always have a secure backup that you can come back to is going to be amazing.
With Cloudways you can easily access backups from the dashboard and restore them.
You can even decide to do a manual backup just to make sure that you have things set up before you start your testing. The backups restore within just a few minutes.
4. Cloudways Breeze: A powerful plugin for your website
One of my favorite features from Cloudways that I have integrated into my WordPress website is their Breeze plugin.
Breeze is an optimization plugin from Cloudways that they own and have created to be able to optimize your website.
It is an all-in-one tool that allows you to minify JS codes, control your cache, optimize images on your website, initiate lazy loading, and so many other things.
These are things that you normally would have to pay for or use several other plugins to be able to get.
But Cloudways makes it easy and puts it all into one integrated plugin.
You have full access to enable and disable whatever you feel suits your website.
Again, I highly recommend that before minimizing any codes or any images that you do all of this on your staging website first to make sure that your website is still running smoothly.
You can also choose to disable the plugin if you find that you have something else that you’re already using.
Personally, I’ve kept it on and it has definitely helped increase my score on the page speed analytics.
5. Easy and Seamless Upgrades and Scalability
If you are looking to scale your business at some point, or scale your website, then Cloudways is going to be great for you.
You may go from 10,000 visitors one month to 100,000 visitors the next month. Cloudways will be able to manage this huge surge of traffic and you easily upgrade and scale your hosting plan without having any cut-offs or downtime.
You will simply be charged for the extra server space that you are using.
If you choose, you can also update and upgrade your hosting plan any time you want.
This all happens easily from the Cloudways dashboard and only takes a few clicks to get set up.
The choice is yours if you simply want to pay for the extra service space that you use that month, or if you want to make a full upgrade.
You can even choose to completely change Server providers if you want to without having any downtime.
For example, I’m currently using Digital Ocean via Cloudways. However, if I choose to switch over to Google Cloud, I can simply upgrade my hosting plan, choose Google Cloud as my new provider, and that’s it!
There is no downtime and no extra cost for the switch that I’ve made.
6. Cloudways Support & Live Chat
Cloudways support and Live Chat have got to be one of the best that I’ve witnessed so far.
I have worked with several other providers like Bluehost, SiteGround, NameCheap, And Hostinger.
But I’ve got to say that Cloudways has been the fastest and easiest support that I’ve received.
When I was first on the platform, I had a bit of a problem with setting up my staging site and making it go live on my website.
I contacted Cloudways support via chat and received a response in under 2 minutes.
As a Blogger myself, I keep an eye on these things.
Not only was the response initial contact very quick, but I got all of the help that I needed just from chatting with their support team.
They even allowed me to test things and recontact them as I was testing the different processes.
I contacted them two more times that same night and got responses just as fast.
I know that with using other hosting providers, I’ve sometimes needed to stay on the phone a long time, send emails that I never got responses to, or chat with someone only to be rerouted to an e-mail service again.
With one hosting provider, I even had to wait two full weeks before I even got my problem fixed.
With Cloudways, it took under 10 minutes.
That really speaks to just how skillful and fast, their support team is.
7. Fast, Free, and easy Site-Migration
Last but not least, Cloudways has the fastest and easiest site migration that you will ever witness.
Migrating a website can be a very daunting task and very intimidating if you are a beginner.
But with Cloudways, you have two options on how you can migrate your site.
For a first-time user, they will do the entire site migration for you at no cost whatsoever.
It really is a great option if you really don’t feel comfortable doing the migration process yourself. However, I recommend this more if you have a complex website that has a lot of pages and a lot of different aspects that can get lost in the process.
So for example, if you have an e-commerce website or a business website with scheduling and calendars and appointments, then you may want to contact Cloudways for your first site migration.
But if you are just a small business website or a small blog, then you are definitely going to want to try to use the second option.
Which is installing the plugin onto your website for Cloudways site migration.
With this plugin alone you’re able to fully migrate your site from any hosting provider that you’re using over to Cloudways with just a few clicks of a button.
This is the exact process that I used for my blog and it was even easier than I thought.
They say that the process can take an hour, but mine only took around 30 minutes.
You can take a look at the full migration process using the plugin In this video.
Do You Want Free Hosting?
So if you’re still hesitating about whether or not Cloudways will be a great place for your website, why not try it out for free?
Cloudways will actually give you 3 days completely for free to test out your website on their platform with absolutely no credit card needed.
During these three days, you’ll have access to any of the servers that you want to use to test them out and do whatever you need to get yourself comfortable with the website.
Then you can make your decision if you want to actually pay for a hosting service on Cloudways or not.
I used the three-day free trial before fully upgrading to Cloudways since I was moving from a shared hosting platform and I found absolutely no problems with it.
So I decided to stick with it and I am now happy to say that this website is hosted on Cloudways.
This site has been on Cloudways for a few months now and honestly, I could not be happier. Not only has my site speed increased, but my cache is better as well. Since I have this site connected to Ahrefs, I’ve also noticed that I’ve generally had a better health score for my website.
Conclusion
I know from personal experience just how intimidating hosting, and especially cloud hosting, can be.
If you are a beginner, it may feel like there’s a lot to look at.
This is why having a platform like Cloudwaysthat makes everything so easy is truly priceless for beginners and for more advanced website owners.
Everything can be done at the click of a button and you’ll always have a sense of security for your website.
Not to mention that they always have free SSL certificates that you’re able to use.
Cloudways really focuses on tailoring each website to the individual client and providing security and reliability to its users.
And the quality-to-price ratio that you find on Cloudways is something that you will not find anywhere else.
So choosing Cloudwaysis really going to be one of the best decisions that you can make for your website and for your business.