Mustaasam Saleem Traditional hosting comes in many shapes and forms such as VPS, Grid and Shared Hosting. Although, one of the most popular hosting choices that most website owners make, within the boundaries of traditional hosting, is shared hosting. The reason is its low cost.
Cheap, however, is not always the right choice. Shared hosting divides your application and data resources on a single hosting server containing all the other user’s applications. It means that all individual clients use the same server resources. If one application observes a spike in traffic or data overload, the server will suffer downtime and slow performance affecting all users equally.
Cloud hosting is a totally different technology. You can deploy your web applications on an optimized dedicated server on reliable data centers, like DigitalOcean, Vultr, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. It means that your websites will not suffer downtime because resources are not shared with any other user.
Step up From Traditional Hosting to Cloud Hosting
Technology is evolving, and it is growing at a brisk pace. With the concept of cloud introduced into the market, hosting on the cloud infrastructure has now become a consistent trend for developers and agencies across the world.
Before the cloud, people preferred shared hosting which meant high page load time and frequent server downtime. But with the cloud, the hassles of slow page load time and downtime have significantly minimized to a considerable extent.
Now, in order to launch your very own website on a cloud infrastructure, you need a managed web hosting platform. A managed web hosting platform enables a user to not only own a server in the cloud, but provides you a number of tools to scale, upgrade and manage it. You can also launch any of the PHP applications through a hosting platform, such as PHP stack, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, PrestaShop, etc.
Are You Choosing the Right Hosting Platform for Your Website?
Choosing the right platform for hosting your website can become a rather tough job, since there are a lot of web hosting platforms. However, a hosting platform that gives you transparency to control your server with a wide variety of cloud infrastructures and applications to host can be considered a remarkable choice.
The right hosting platform will give you the liberty to customize your server size, bandwidth and disk size according to your preference. It will further give you a number of options such as cron job management tool, the ability to migrate your website, scaling, monitoring, backup options and much more.
What Are You Looking for in Your WordPress Host?
If you have a content based website, you will require a Content Management System (CMS). Talking about CMS, one can find a number of small and large CMSs on the market. However, the best CMS in the world by far is WordPress because it cuts down your coding hassles to minimal by offering you a user friendly backend admin panel. Apply themes and craft your website that best fits your needs with a wide range of plugins.
What every WordPress website owner seeks is an easier way to launch their application using a hosting platform that gives them a single click solution to launch WordPress website on Cloud. Nobody wants to get into the eternal dilemmas of managing servers using cPanel; hence, they search for a hosting platform that offers a user friendly interface to launch their very own WordPress website.
One of the most important elements while choosing a hosting provider for WordPress website is the element of trust. While a large number of hosting providers offer high customizability options and decent server uptime, but with WordPress hosting, many names fail to stand out from the competition in the long run.
In order to host your WordPress application or website on a Managed Cloud Hosting Platform, it is necessary that the respective hosting platform should have the following attributes.
Support
To host the WordPress application through a cloud hosting platform, it is necessary that one should identify which hosting platform has the best online support available 24/7/365. Hosting platforms offering Live Chat Support are much better than those which do not provide the same service. Although some platforms give you the same Live Chat Support pop up window at the bottom of their web page, however, it eventually leads the user to an email based support which results in losing the customer’s interest in the product or service.
Multiple Managed Hosting Platforms give commendable technical assistance. However, Cloudways offers you a Live Chat support that stands unparalleled by its competitors. Their support agents are always available at your service and they will guide you out of your dilemma as smoothly as slicing butter. Moreover, WordPress hosting support engineers are equipped with excellent knowledge of the different type of themes, plugins, settings, updates and much more.
Security
One such element that draws users attention when choosing the right web hosting platform for WordPress websites is security. When working in a shared hosting environment, once a server is exposed to cyber threats, all the clients that are attached to the server are vulnerable. Such an instance doesn’t occur when a user hosts their WordPress website in a managed cloud environment.
So why should one consider the managed cloud above shared hosting platform, concerning security? The answer is simple! You get a single optimized environment on which security hardening techniques are applied. Observing the platform at the macro level, the managed cloud saves the hassles of the user to install operating system upgrades and run server firewalls for applications such as Magento, Joomla, PrestaShop, WordPress, etc.
A good managed hosting provider such as Cloudways prompts users about any updates on WordPress. With just a single click, you can update application version of your WordPress through the hosting platform.
Optimized WordPress Installation
With Cloudways, you get an optimized WordPress installation. This means that you don’t have to get into the hassle of downloading WordPress, uploading it to your web server, creating databases and configuring it.
Cloudways offers you a click and go solution. All you need to do is select your cloud infrastructure, the application you want to run – WordPress in our case- and set attributes (bandwidth, server size, region), then hit launch. In just few minutes, your web server will be ready. To acquire access to your WordPress dashboard, navigate to Application Management Tab and click the URL in Access Details.
Tools to Manage WordPress Application
When launching your WordPress Application over a cloud infrastructure, it is necessary for a user to have full control on their server and application. An excellent hosting platform allows users to manage both the controls, Server and Application management, efficiently.
At Cloudways, users get two separate tabs for server and application management. They can quickly scale their server size, observe network traffic, perform vertical scaling, automate backups and do much more on server level on one hand. While on the other, they can effectively perform application management and migrate their existing web app data to the Cloudways Managed Hosting Platform with the help of the WordPress Migrator Tool.
My Personal Recommendation
My personal recommendation would be Cloudways. Why? Because…
Cloudways is one such platform that gives you a user friendly interface, responsive design and excellent technical support. With the new Cloudways 2.0, you can host your WordPress website on one of the four renowned cloud infrastructures, namely Google Compute Engine (GCE), Amazon Web Service (AWS), DigitalOcean & Vultr.
It comes with three different configurations for WordPress (Simple WordPress, WordPress Multisite and WordPress with WooCommerce). Additionally, it provides an easy way to access your WordPress dashboard in just a few clicks.
About Cloudways
Cloudways is a unique hosting platform which offers customers a broad spectrum of usability and accessibility options. It combines the power of caching technologies, MySQL database and prompt support to give a fully optimized experience to users across the globe. With data centers located in 7 different regions around the world, the platform provides four cloud infrastructure providers and a number of applications to craft your website. May it be a blog, an educational portal system, a community forum, CRM or an online web store, Cloudways encompasses all. You get a separate tab for server management as well as for application management. Expand horizons with Cloudways! Focus on your business and let the experts handle your coding and hosting complications.