The hosting journey
It’s been eight years since I started designing websites. So, naturally, I have used almost every hosting solution available.
I started my journey with Yahoo! hosting to build a WordPress website. And soon I found out they don’t give access to .htaccess files. Without the .htaccess file, I was not able to change the URLs to user-readable URLs.
So, I quickly shifted to GoDaddy in 2-3 months. Again made a mistake of buying Windows hosting for a WordPress website. And soon found out it was not working well. Got that hosting refunded and changed it to a Linux one.
As I started building more websites, I need a reseller hosting. So that I could sell it to my customers along with the website. Which in turn led to purchasing a shared yet powerful hosting from GoDaddy and a reselling hosting from InMotion.
As I was using InMotion and GoDaddy simultaneously, I found out that InMotion was far better than GoDaddy. Their support was excellent; their quality of hosting was too good.
The only issue was pricing. InMotion hosting was good, but the customers I had at that time didn’t have that much budget. So, as a business decision, I had to give up InMotion after 6-7 months while a bit inferior GoDaddy hosting was still in use.
Without going into the story further, I’ll just write down the different hostings I used till now.
Different hostings I used till date
Yahoo! business hosting
GoDaddy
Hostgator
Mazeweb
Mochahost
WPMU DEV
Cloudways Hosting (This link is not an affiliate link. None of the link on this page for Cloudways is an affiliate link. The links to other hostings are affiliate ones.)
A different league of hostings
I would like to take out a few hostings from the above list. Because these were the fastest hosting, I have used till date.
The first one is WP Engine, then Kinsta and then Cloudways Hosting.
Why did I single out these three hosting providers?
Because these hostings are superfast, have fantastic support and are far better for people who want a simple managed solution for their WordPress website.
While WP Engine and Kinsta can host only the WordPress sites; Cloudways can host any PHP application, including WordPress. It does support other kinds of applications as well. But for now, we will just focus on WordPress.
These hosting providers also take daily backups automatically. So, in case there is some issue with the site, you can just restore the working version of the backup. Having automated backups take a massive worry of backups from your head.
CloudWays
If you want to have a superfast site without fiddling with the server and the tech behind it, you have to use something like WP Engine, Kinsta or Cloudways.
Performance-wise they are almost the same. So, what is the difference?
While WP Engine and Kinsta starts @ $30/mo. Cloudways starts @ $11/mo.
That’s a massive difference in price!
Now, Cloudways is not precisely managed WordPress hosting. But it is a managed cloud hosting.
What does it mean?
With WP Engine and Kinsta, you don’t have much control over the server and hence the pricing plans.
For example, take a look at the pricing of WP Engine.
As you can see, you can select the plan depending upon your site visitors, the storage you need, bandwidth and the number of sites.
Kinsta uses a similar kind of pricing.
But on the other hand, Cloudways allows you to select right from the cloud vendor. You can choose to host your site on Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, Google Cloud or AWS (Amazon Web Services)
For example, you selected the Digital Ocean. Now in the next step, they will ask you to choose the size of the server you need. They will also ask you to select the data centre. For example, Digital Ocean has a data centre in Bangalore. So, you can choose Bangalore if the majority of the visitors on your site are from India.
How should I know which server size to select?
Well, the good thing is their 24×7 support will help you out. Or the approach you can take is select with the basic configuration and scale-up (Cloudways does support automatic scaling up of the server) as per the need.
Therefore technically you don’t need much knowledge about the servers to host your site on Cloudways.
Isn’t it bit complex than WP Engine or Kinsta? Where I just need to select the number of visitors and storage.
I won’t call it complicated, but what I can say is it adds few more steps in creating your server.
But the amount of money you save on this is enormous.
To give you an example of my savings, my site was hosted a couple of months back on Kinsta, and I was paying $30/mo. The site performance was, no doubt extraordinary.
But then I decided to try Cloudways; I went with Bangalore data centre of Digital Ocean with RAM of 1GB. A basic plan to start with. And to my amazement, there was absolutely no dip in the performance.
No performance or speed issue.
So, I saved $240 on hosting annually without any performance compromise.
And you can see the PageSpeed Insights here.
There might be one more problem in your mind. Shall I select Digital Ocean, AWS or Linode or something else?
Well, the good thing is, all of them are equally good. You won’t go wrong with selecting any on them.
Why not directly buy the server from Digital Ocean, Linode or the other mentioned server providers at a lower cost?
Well, if you try to buy directly from these companies, then you have to everything from installing different software manually on the server, updating the servers, updating the operating system.
If you are tech-savvy, then do buy directly, but be ready to handle the monster of server management.
What Cloudways does, is it adds a layer of management tools over these servers. So that you never have to learn anything like Linux commands, Apache config, Nginx config and some other scary stuff.
Conclusion
As you can see, Cloudways provides a managed cloud hosting solution with pricing in your hand without the compromise of the speed or performance.
If you liked this review, you can go and try Cloudways for Free. If you think my review helped you, then do go to the Tools I Use page and click on the Cloudways affiliate link.
