As a freelance web designer, a key part of building a website is where it will be hosted, and after searching for years, I have found Cloudways hosting to be the perfect fit.
The following are some of the advantages of Cloudways for WordPress hosting that make it such a popular choice for website owners, developers, and businesses:
1. Managed Hosting:
This is a managed hosting environment; updates and patches are included, along with server security configuration. In such a case, you will be free to focus on the website and not on the maintenance of the server.
Cloudways provides an intuitive control panel that might make it easier to manage the WordPress website for domain management, SSL certificate, backup, etc.
2. Scalability:
It is easy to scale up server resources with Cloudways as your site grows: RAM, CPU, and storage. This is necessary for WordPress sites that may have fluxes in traffic. Plus, you only pay for the resources you use, making it an affordable solution for businesses of all sizes.
3. Performance:
Cloudways has excellent speed and performance because of the utilization of SSD-based servers, dedicated resources, and advanced caching mechanisms like Varnish, Memcached, and Redis.
Global Data Centers: Cloudways partners with the leading cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode, thus giving you the opportunity to choose data centres spread across different parts of the world, which could further help you reduce latency and page load times.
4. Security:
Cloudways provides several key security features, which include a dedicated firewall, bot protection, a vulnerability scanner powered by Patchstack, automated backups, two-factor authentication, and free SSL certificates protecting your WordPress site against potential threats.
Furthermore, the application of periodic security patches ensures that your server is updated on time with all the latest security patches, which decreases the probability of vulnerability.
5. Backup and Restore:
It features automatic backups, which you can have with flexible retention policies, making it easy to restore your site should problems arise. In case anything goes bad, you can one-click restore it in no time.
6. Staging Environment:
As a developer, this is one of my favourite options – a one one-click staging environment that allows you to test changes, updates or new plugins/themes before deploying them to your online site. The staging environment is created easily and it creates a temporary URL that you can send to your client.
Then, when your updates are done, any updates can be pushed from the staging site to the live site, once again by just clicking one button.
7. Support:
Cloudways also offers customer support day and night via live chats and ticketing. Their support is quite conversant with WordPress, therefore being in a position to handle different technical problems. Thirdly, Cloudways possess an extensive knowledge base and very active community forums where individuals can look into troubleshooting and learning.
8. Developer-Friendly:
And for developers, Cloudways has Git, SSH, and Staging environments to maintain code updates easily with collaborative team possibilities.
You can get a WordPress site up and running in minutes with a URL and SSL installed, so you can start developing right away, instead of having a subdomain and waiting for its DNS propagation.
Users can also choose a version of PHP, their database, and other preferences related to the server based on the project at work.
9. Value for Money:
The prices are competitive, considering this is a managed service on top of premium cloud infrastructure courtesy of their partners.
Cloudways uses a monthly billing cycle without any long-term contracts, hence offering flexibility with regard to service commitments.
10. Free Migration:
Cloudways also offers free website migrations that help users migrate their WordPress sites to Cloudways with zero downtime and no loss of data.
The above-mentioned features are the reasons why Cloudways can be viewed as one of the options for hosting WordPress websites, offering a balance of performance, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness.
Conclusion
If you’re a freelancer looking for affordable managed hosting for your websites, then Cloudways on Digital Ocean is great, and you can sign up using the link below.