Cloudways – A Magento Hosting Platform for Store Owners, Developers and Designers
Many people forget that their ecommerce store is actually a website that requires a robust hosting solution that ensures maximum uptime. In the case of a Magento powered store, the requirements for resources and uptime increase because of the business requirements.
We see many first timers (and some experienced) store owners opt for the cheapest hosting solution they could find. Such hosting solution work fine during testing and initial days of the business when the traffic and the requirements on website resources are not that high. However, come the first major sale and things break down dramatically.
This is why you need a hosting provider that understands the essential requirements of Magento hosting. One such hosting provider is Cloudways, a managed Magento hosting platform that offers a lot of bang for the buck.
Initial Impressions
Cloudways cost (slightly) more than traditional hosting solutions. However, for the higher price the choice of IaaS provider, user friendly dashboard, and many other features that enhance your Magento store management experience are included. When you sign up on Cloudways, you get to host your Magento store on either Amazon Web Services (AWS), DigitalOcean (DO), Google Compute Engine (GCE), Vultr, and Kyup. In addition, with over 40 data centers, you have the option to host your Magento store close to your target market. This reduces the latency related issues and the website access and page load speed of your Magento store improves significantly.
Cloudways is a managed Magento hosting platform. This means that you do not have to get an account on these IaaS providers and then go to Cloudways for management. Everything from the initial setup of the IaaS account to the final activation of the Magento store is handled right through the Cloudways Platform. In this way your store is ready for business in a matter of minutes rather than days.
Rock Solid Performance
A Magento store requires rock solid performance from the underlying hosting solution. The requirements for resources fluctuate according to the traffic and transactions on the store. The high performance and steady availability of resources became possible due to the unique combination of server and cache technologies, which offers the perfect home for your Magento store.
The mix of server and cache technologies is called ThunderStack. The recipe comprises of Apache and Nginx as web servers that are supported by Varnish and Memcached. The result is a blazing fast Magento store that is able to handle high demands of the holiday season sales crunch. The ThunderStack is also supported by PHP-FPM, Redis and database managers such as MariaDB and MySQL.
1-Click for (Almost) Everything
Unlike other managed Magento hosting platforms, you can carry out all major actions on the Cloudways Platform in a matter of clicks. The process starts right from the beginning when you select server specifications and launch your Magento app in a single click. This idea is replicated throughout the Platform and you could easily set and modify a host of settings and options through the 1-click design of the UI.
Security Above All
Security is the primary concern of every Magento store owner. Online shoppers have become very security conscious and a store that does not implement proper security processes will soon have to close its (virtual) shutter down permanently.
Cloudways offer several protection layers for the Magento stores. It starts with the lowest hardware and OS level where Cloudways engineers implement security and update patches as soon as they are released. On the application level, all Magento stores hosted on CLoudways Platform are secured with SSL certificates. The best thing about these certificates is that they are free and available on 1-click installation. The display of the green padlock indicates that the Magento store takes data security very seriously.
All the Resources Your Magento Store Needs
There is no denying that a Magento store requires a lot of resources. When it comes to the crunch time of the holiday sales and the requirements skyrocket. This is where many Magento hosting providers disappoint their clients.
Cloudways follows a different approach wherein the customer decides all the critical requirements for their store. Thus, instead of being limited by a pre-packaged combination of resources, Cloudways customers select the IaaS vendor, CPU and RAM for their Magento store. This way, the customers are confident that the store is able to handle the rigors of real world traffic and sales transactions.
Even the best estimates could fail, and this is why Cloudways offer vertical scalability of resources that ensure that no matter the load of the resources, ecommerce stores hosted on Cloudways are always operational and open for business.
Experts at Your Service
Almost every Magento hosting provider promises customer support. In reality, many hosting providers use their marketing and sales people to answer customers’ queries. The result is slow and lacklustre customer service that often fail to resolve the issues.
Cloudways has a dedicated team of Magento experts that support their customer support teams. This means that when you raise a Magento issue ticket at Cloudways, your issue is examined and resolved by a Magento expert who understands the issue in the context of your particular Magento store.
Cloudways has a very streamlined customer support process that allows customers to utilize several channels including the ticket system, email and live chat which is available 24x7x365.
The Best Part of This Review
We have an exclusive offer for our readers – A $15 credit coupon that is applicable for all Magento hosting options.
Visit the Cloudways Signup page and enter the coupon code HOSTMAGENTO. This is a great way of trying out the Magento hosting solutions offered by Cloudways.
