Cloudways – A Speedy, Secure and Reliable WooCommerce Hosting Solution

woocommerce hosting

Last updated - May 30, 2023

WooCommerce Needs a Speedy, Secure and Supportive Hosting Solution. Let’s start with a fact. Having an attractive and well-marketed website gets you the attention you need on the internet. But in case of conversions, only an attractive design is not enough. In fact, conversions may be affected if your WooCommerce hosting solution is not up-to-the-mark. 

Consider the following situations when your website:

  • Goes unresponsive due to lesser uptime
  • Does not load web pages swiftly
  • Doesn’t get support when required
  • Is hosted by unreliable or shared servers
  • Files are not backed up efficiently

In any of the above scenarios, including a few that weren’t mentioned, your WooCommerce website’s success could be compromised. 

So, in order to avoid any of the mentioned scenarios, you need a dedicated team to manage and support your WooCommerce store in the best way possible.

After a considerable amount of research, I decided to try Cloudways, a managed hosting service that comes highly recommended through lots of reviews posted online. I decided to try it out and post my own review and see what the hype is all about. 

Cloudways – A Brief Intro

Available Web Service Providers

Cloudways is a managed hosting solution for your WooCommerce store. It brings the best cloud infrastructures to its customers like DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform, all under one roof. 

With Cloudways I was surprised to find WooCommerce pre-installed. Another cool thing was that Cloudways offered to migrate my WooCommerce site free the first time. 

Let’s see what else is offered.

1-Click Server Sizes

Cloudways provides a series of different server sizes starting from1GB RAM, 25GB SSD Disk, 1TB Transfer and 1 Core Processor.

This gave me confidence that no matter what the size is of your business, Cloudways has your back. You can also scale the server size at any point of time within a few clicks. Unlike other platforms, at Cloudways, you have no restrictions. 

60+ Server Locations at your Disposal

Reaching out to a wider audience in the quickest time is possible. That is because the closer your server’s location is to your target audience, the faster will be the response and download times for your content. 

Cloudways = Awesome Speed!

Cloudways provides 99.9% of uptime through ThunderStack, which is claimed to be the fastest hosting stack ever, you will see dramatic speed optimizations in page loading times. 

The stack includes names like NGINX, Varnish Cache, Apache, PHP FPM, etc. The properties of each of these can be customized as per your requirements too. You can also use an in-house engineered WordPress cache plugin called Breeze, a Hassle-Free WordPress Cache Plugin.

In addition to the features mentioned, you also have CDN (Cloudways Content Delivery Network) integrated within the Cloudways framework for better content delivery speed and zero lag. I found this awesome feature out-performing other CDNs by a good margin.

My page loading speeds went up dramatically and even with heavy traffic, I felt no slow-downs of any sort.  

Cloudways = Superior Security

Security is something that must be taken seriously by any hosting service. Sadly, shared hosting providers tend to overlook security. I personally have been a victim of not only speed but also security issues that plague shared hosting platforms. 

Thankfully, Cloudways stresses a lot on not only emphasizing the need for a secure server but also providing features that ensure your WooCommerce website is secure against malicious attacks and other security threats that plague the internet. 

On with the security features that I found very helpful.

Free SSL Certificate

Cloudways provides you a free 1-click SSL certificate by Let’s Encrypt which can be easily installed within each application for improved security to fulfill your HTTPS requirements.

Staging Areas and URLs

Cloudways provides you an option to have a separate staging area for your web application. You can now create a test website and analyze it in the staging area. After you test it, you take it to live whenever you want. 

Customer Support

After testing the speed and security features. The next section I wanted to test was customer support. 

This is where an impression either makes or breaks with good hosting companies. Cloudways does not disappoint in this regard. You have 24X7/365 expert support that is always online and ready to help.

The team at Cloudways is available 24×7/x365 to answer all your queries regarding all server and application side issues.

There are multiple ways of how Cloudways provides support, through Live Chat and regular ticketing systems.  Personally I found the support team technically sound and prompt at fixing issues.

After Launching My Server

Now that we’ve had a go-through about the main elements that make Cloudways a great hosting choice, we can get into the features that proved to be very helpful for a website. 

Once my server was deployed, which took just 7 minutes, I went about setting up my Server(s), Applications, Team Members, Projects, and a section to add more add-ons. 

Some of the notable features are highlighted below:

Server Management

  • Master Credentials has SFTP and SSH access details for all applications. You can also upload SSH Public Keys to access it without password prompts.
  • Monitoring tab helps you monitor Idle CPU, Free Disk, Free Memory, Bandwidth, MySQL connections and other performance stats of both your server and the application. 

These are available in the form of graphs with a time period of as low as 1 hour up to 6 months.

  • Manage Services tab helps you to monitor and control core services as shown below.
  • Settings and Packages tab helps you to set your server’s data limits, time-zone, memory, and settings related to Caching Add-ons.
  • Vertical Scaling will allow you to increase your RAM, CPU and Storage sizes at any time.
  • Backups let you schedule your website backups, you can also ask for an on-demand backup from here. Enabling Local Backups option creates a downloadable copy of applications.
  • Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) lets you set your SMTP services by adding your own or activate any internal add-on available.

Application Management

  • Access Detail contains information to access your application. It contains your application’s URL, admin, and MySQL credentials. You can also launch your database manager from here.
  • Domain Management lets you have your domain name here. Learn how to record entry at your DNS provider, in case you are using your custom domain name. You can add additional domains here too.
  • Cron Job Management lets you add multiple cron jobs.
  • SSL Certificates can be created by Cloudways for free. You can also create custom SSL certificates using Customer Signing Request(CSR).
  • Restore helps you to restore your web app with the help of the backup available with a click.
  • Deployment via Git can help you deploy your work at Github, using SSH keys, that can be generated in this tab.
  • Migration Tools i.e. WordPress Migration Tool will let you migrate your application from other hosting services to Cloudways without any hardships. I did mention the first migration is free, right?
  • CloudwaysCDN, with CloudwaysCDN you can boost the speed of your website even further, by spreading your content to all the internet.

This is followed by team and project management settings.

Conclusion

If you are just starting with WooCommerce and want Cloudways as your hosting platform, you have chosen the right platform. 

Cloudways combines the best technologies designed for speed while offering the best and most useful features to manage your WooCommerce store and see it come to its full potential.  

I can wholeheartedly recommend Cloudways after putting it through its paces and diving deep into the features it provides. My experience was fantastic and I plan on keeping my personal website on the Cloudways platform for a long time. 

All the features and experiences I shared makes Cloudways the best web hosting for WooCommerce. Migration is easy so it takes away a huge hassle often faced with other hosting services. I urge you to try it out and give your feedback regarding your experience in the comments box below.

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