Cloudways Review: Is it the ecommerce hosting for you?

Published by Dimira Teneva in Metrilo Updates and Use Tips. 5 mins to read.

Ecommerce businesses spend thousands on setting up websites, but fizzle out when they have to choose a website hosting solution for these websites. Experts say that one major reason why most ecommerce stores fail is weak website hosting infrastructure.

Businesses in the US alone lost over $3 billion last year because of hosting-related issues. Since most small stores only operate online, choosing the right managed hosting infrastructure has become even more serious.

Reasons why ecommerce hosting can be an issue

When does your hosting become a problem?

Your hosting solution is shared meaning it stacks too many websites on a single server.
You blame any technical problems you experience on the ecommerce platform you use and not on your hosting provider.
When you’ve tried all kinds of plugins and extension to improve website performance and it’s still bad.
The customer service your hosting solution provides doesn’t resolve issues.

How cloud hosting solves ecommerce problems

A cloud hosting solution extracts the power of the whole data center to keep your website working at maximum speed. This has a positive effect on site performance, user engagement, and order volume. Cloud hosting is dedicated, reliable, and much more affordable to use than a shared hosting solution.

For instance, a cloud hosting solution for 50 websites will cost about $10. But you can’t host 50 domains on a shared hosting solution available for the same price.

Introducing managed cloud hosting

The next level of cloud hosting is with a level of management added. Most providers do not offer that by default, but Cloudways ecommerce hosting does.

All you have to do is launch your servers on Cloudways, select an app, and choose a desired datacenter. Cloudways will create the server, install the app on it, and make it ready for operations – all within 10 minutes. It offers many additional plugins like application setting, free migration, auto-server scaling, application bug fixing and more.

Moreover, users can get notifications from Cloudways directly on their mobile. This gives you a peace of mind that your website’s tech needs are taken care of and you can focus on other parts of the business while Cloudways handles the hosting operations effortlessly.

Features of the Cloudways managed cloud hosting

Faster performance

Cloudways offers SSD-based hosting to improve website performance and make it load even faster than most other shared, VPS, dedicated hosting solutions available – page loading speed on it can easily get down to less than a second.

Freedom to choose

Choose from five cloud hosting infrastructures: DigitalOcean, AWS, GCE, Linode, and Vultr. Migrate your website for free and set it live within hours.

Better security

Cloudways offers Two Factor Authentication (2FA), IP whitelisting, password attempt limits, and many other multi cloud security features to keep your store safe and thriving.

24/7 Expert support

The Cloudways experts are always available to help you with any issues so your store doesn’t suffer down time.

Enhanced collaboration

Cloudways allows you and your team to collaborate on various hosting projects. If an agency is handling your ecommerce store, they can grant you access to the server or they can even transfer the server to you while retaining administrative rights.

Real-time monitoring

Cloudways users can monitor server resources in real time – bandwidth, RAM, storage, and even incoming and outgoing traffic to optimize performance and remove bugs.

Next-generation CDN

If you want to take your site speed one notch up, integrate the Cloudways Content Delivery Network (CDN) on top. The service distributes your content globally for lightning-fast, static and dynamic content delivery.

Free SSL

As a client, you get SSL Certification powered by Let’s Encrypt.

Optimized stack

Cloudways ThunderStack is one of the fastest custom hosting stacks that makes ecommerce stores load effortlessly in no time.

Cloudways pricing

Cloudways hosting works on pay-as-you-go model. This means you only have to pay for server resources your site uses. For instance, if you run your server for 10 days and the monthly charge is $10, you will only pay $3 for the 10-day server usage.

The monthly cost depends on the infrastructure provider. For example, DigitalOcean costs $10 a month while Linode costs $12. All details are on the Cloudways pricing page.

Cloudways DigitalOcean price package

How fast is Cloudways?

Here’s QuickSprout’s survey on site loading times.

Source: QuickSprout Average Website Speed Survey

Cloudways can improve this server load time by 200%.

WooCommerce Speed Test (Cloudways)

Details:

Server: WooCommerce with WordPress 5.0.3
Server type: DigitalOcean
RAM: 4GB
Location: San Francisco, US

The test is made with Pingdom.

As you can see, the WooCommerce store’s speed is only 414ms and the page size is only 228kbs.

Magento Speed Test (Cloudways)

Details:

Server: Magento 2.2.6
Server type: DigitalOcean
RAM: 4GB
Location: San Francisco, USA

If you are still wondering whether cloud hosting is the right solution for your Magento store, that’s fine. A cloud hosting solution offers unmatched performance in comparison with shared hosting. Here is one more test from the Cloudways ecommerce speed test report just to give you an idea about how fast cloud hosting is.

Note: Both WooCommerce and Magento are tested with the default themes and no plugins. When you add custom themes, plugins and more content, the speed will decrease. To optimize your website then, you can use cache plugins such as Breeze by Cloudways.

Getting started with Cloudways

You can launch a server with Cloudways in just 10 minutes. Here is how.

First, create a Cloudways account. There’s a free 3-day trial.
Launch your first server. You will have to select an application as shown below.
Then pick a server of your choice. Since AWS is a lot more scalable, we have chosen it for launching the Magento ecommerce platform.

4. Adjust the Server size, Bandwidth, and RAM of your server according to your needs.

5. Choose a server location (preferably one that’s closest to your target audience).

6. It is time to launch your Magento ecommerce store on Cloudways.

You get a custom price quote and are ready to go.

What’s next?

Now that you have launched your first server with Cloudways, take your store live. If you already have a store running, you can migrate it to Cloudways. You get one free migration when launching the first server. You can also get the official migration plugin that automates the whole process so instead of debugging your new store, you will mostly sit back and relax.

Disclosure: Cloudways is an official Metrilo partner.

About the author

With experience in FMCG and marketing, Dimira writes to help the brands of tomorrow succeed and believes passion is a key ingredient in any business.