[Guest Post] Cloudways – A Managed Magento Hosting Platform for Everyone

Stable and reliable hosting is the key to success for any Magento store. That’s why our eyes are always open for the best Magento hosting providers. This time, it’s Cloudways’ turn. Offering a bunch of great features that help SMBs, agencies, and merchants to grow every single day, Cloudways plays an important role for Magento users in the cloud hosting industry.

Let’s take a deeper look at their services and features.

How Cloudways support Magento applications

When it comes to hosting Magento stores, managed hosting involves cloud server management being handled by experts from the hosting provider.

Magento is a complex eCommerce platform that requires optimized server performance to be a success. From experience, we can attest that running a Magento-based business is a hectic process. No store owner wants to deal with the added burden of dealing with the intricacies of server management on top of their day-to-day operations.

Cloudways is partnered with industry giants including Amazon Web Services (AWS), DigitalOcean (DO), Google Compute Engine (GCE), Linode, and Vultr. This allows the platform to provide clients with a streamlined, powerful hosting experience.

At first glance, Cloudways hosting price options may look a little steep for many store owners. But these prices include the cost of infrastructure along with all the managed resources.

So instead of purchasing an account with one of these cloud infrastructure providers, and then paying someone to manage the account and the Magento installation, you could just sign up for a managed Magento hosting account on Cloudways and free yourself from the hassles of server management and performance optimization. In that case, it becomes pocket-friendly.

Speed that thrills

A fast store is essential for a smooth user experience. To make sure that all visitors to Cloudways-hosted Magento stores have a great experience, Cloudways has developed a unique hosting solution named ThunderStack that employs state-of-the-art caching technologies in the form of Varnish and Memcached, which are coupled with Nginx and Apache for blazing fast results.

To further improve the speed of a Magento store, the ThunderStack has optional services, like PHP-FPM and Redis. Tests from Cloudways have shown stores hosted on their Magento hosting platform outperform the ones hosted on other mediums by 100%.

Furthermore, Cloudways supports the latest PHP versions, especially PHP 7.x. All customers could now leverage the performance and security enhancements, improvements, scalability and improvements offered by the latest releases of PHP. In particular, Magento 2.4.x supports PHP 7.4 right out of the box. This means that the Cloudways Magento Hosting Platform is always up to par with the latest industry standards.

Ironclad security for Magento applications

Security is the watchword in the Magento community. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) has become the de-facto standard of security on the internet. Thus, in order to appear credible and secure, Magento stores must have SSL certificates.

Cloudways offers FREE SSL certificates by Let’s Encrypt for all Magento hosting solutions. The ease of installing SSL certificates in just a few clicks is something that every Magento store owner would appreciate. Plus, you can install your third-party security extensions.

Cloudways takes the security and protection of personal data very seriously. The cloud platform confirms that all personal information of all clients is fully protected using prevalent industry standards. You can also whitelist unwanted IPs and secure access for your SSH and Database credentials.

When it comes to the security of your server, Cloudways protects it by applying patches to the individual Magento server. As Magento stores are made up of complex structures, updating the core app can be problematic for hosting providers. Here, Cloudways comes with a unique feature named CloudwaysBot. The bot informs the store owners if their Magento version is vulnerable or requires an update.

Staging management

Testing out new features is essential for both the performance as well as user experience, but the fear of breaking things can haunt store owners. Cloudways deals with this by letting you create a staging site of your production store where you can test out new features fearlessly.

Staging features can be accessed directly from the platform, and both database and web files can be PUSHED or PULLED on a click of a button.

Let’s also quickly explore how easy it’s to create a staging environment with Cloudways.

Choose the application you want to create the staging URL for.

It takes a few seconds to create the staging environment. Once it’s done, you can Push or Pull the web files with a single click.

Scale server resources for your Magento store

The bigger your Magento store is, the more computational resources it requires for stable operation. With Cloudways, meeting the server requirements of the store is very easy. Simply select a server size that matches your daily requirements and deploy it on Cloudways. If you are confused, our Support Team is available 24/7/365 to assist you. They will check your case and come up with the right combination of server resources and hosting package plan for your Magento store.

Moreover, you can quickly scale your servers on Cloudways using the Vertical Scaling feature inside the Platform. And you can downgrade the server resources via the cloning feature when you think your store doesn’t need any additional resources.

Everything’s on 1-click

The general perception about cloud hosting is that it is not user-friendly and that you need to hire a team of experts to keep things ticking. However, Cloudways provides everyone the opportunity of launching a Magento store through 1-Click installation platform. 

Not only that, it lets you employ all the major hosting services in a matter of clicks, from launching a server to pointing a URL, from installing a SSL certificate to cloning your store.

You can access the SSH directly from the browser itself. These days, developers and store owners love Git. On Cloudways, you can create workflows using Git tools. You also get building services for setting Varnish rules and powering up search with Elasticsearch.

You can also backup and restore the applications files with a single click.

Monitor server & application resources

The overall setup with Cloudways is quick and the store will be up-and-running in no time. The platform takes care of many of the server-side hassles of hosting a Magento store. However, performance statistics could vary significantly based on the choice of the PaaS provider, server parameters, and the location of the server.

Given this, Cloudways offers a complete monitoring dashboard that lets you keep an eye on all the operations. It helps you to plan and execute in a timely manner. 

Cloudways also offers to integrate New Relic so you can have a deeper look with the consumption of Magento resources.

Now comes the good part!

Cloudways has provided a $50 FREE hosting credit for Magestore customers using the promo code: “MAGECLOUDWAYS50”. This coupon is applicable to all Magento hosting plans. Just go to the Cloudways signup page and enter the coupon code to avail this offer. 
If you still want to explore Cloudways Platform for FREE, you can opt for a trial account for 3-day with DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr. Or book a free demo so one of their experts can answer your Magento hosting queries.