[ad_1] Managed cloud hosting is a remarkable upgrade from the traditional cloud hosting option, allowing businesses to get more done in less time. But finding a provider who gets it right can be tough. Compared to traditional hosting, managing a cloud service requires more effort. A provider must keep the site fully updated, run regular security checks, create data backups, and allocate resource utilization based on load changes frequently. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that promises to deliver unmatched performance, ironclad security, and seamless scalability for your websites. But is it all true? In this Cloudways review, we’ll dig into its features, pricing, and more to help you determine if it’s the right option for you. Let’s start from the very beginning. Cloudways Review: What Is It? Launched in 2011, Cloudways is a managed hosting services provider that helps users reap the benefits of the cloud. It has its own managed platform, allowing you to spin up servers and deploy apps within minutes. Cloudways supports all the top website building tools, such as WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, PHP, and many open-source tools. The company works with five top cloud providers—AWS (Amazon Web Services), Linode, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, and Vultr—to offer a variety of cloud computing services to its customers. The great thing about Cloudways is its “pay-as-you-pricing.” The pricing model allows you to pay depending on the resources you need. This makes Cloudways an ideal choice for SMBs and individual users with a limited budget. Cloudways’ main appeal is managed cloud hosting. It’s a step up from the traditional managed hosting many of us are accustomed to. Let me give you the 411 on how managed cloud hosting can boost your website hosting experience. Article Continues Below Why Managed Cloud Hosting? Managed cloud hosting is a more cost-effective and scalable solution compared to traditional managed hosting. With traditional hosting solutions, your site and its data are stored on a single server with one backup. Cloudways stores your site in the cloud across multiple servers for greater protection and stronger performance. Because your site is stored on multiple servers, you’ll have several backups, and you’ll be able to restore your site if there’s ever a problem easily. The cloud environment also means you can prompt multiple copies of your site to be replaced throughout any data centers of your liking. Cloudways hosting also delivers better uptime and reliability because any server in its cloud network can take over if the first one stops working. This is known as having a “failover” strategy. Additionally, because Cloudways can detect a website visitor’s location, the system can also intelligently load information from the server closest to that person, meaning your site loads faster. With a sophisticated algorithm handling all of the data switching and a copy of your site maintained across servers, Cloudways offers much greater reliability and performance. Great if you want to keep things smooth but, don’t know how to manage all the technical bits behind the scenes. Cloudways Review: The Features The exact features you’ll get from Cloudways depend on the hosting plan you choose. Advanced plans give you access to more bandwidth, memory, storage, and processing power. But all Cloudways users get: 1. Free site migrations If you already have your website hosted on another site, you can easily choose Cloudways to handle the migration for you. This can save you a lot of time trying to collect all the information required from one server to move to another. 2. High-speed server performance Cloudways strives to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible, with access to the latest technology from 5 of the top cloud providers in the world. The provider also relies on CDN to deliver content via a geographically distributed network of servers, which helps minimize lags in loading web page content. 3. Auto-healing Cloudways makes it easy to handle any issues your website might have with a unique automatic healing feature. The auto-healing system identifies the source of a problem when a crash is imminent and addresses it by itself. No manual intervention is needed. 4. Excellent security For peace of mind, Cloudways offers a dedicated firewall to help protect you and your customers. Additionally, you get features like two-factor authentication to prevent intruders from gaining access to member accounts. Users can also access a free SSL certificate (via Let’s Encrypt) to protect all data moving between your site and your visitors. 5. Simple setup Cloudways allows you to set up a website with one click. There’s also one-click app and plugin installation if you want to add new functionality to your site. The provider fully supports PHP-based applications and CMS frameworks like Magento, Drupal, Laravel, and WordPress. 6. Staging and Cloning Staging allows you to create a dummy website where you can test any changes before they go live. This is a great way to ensure everything works properly before making a change. You can also clone sites and make copies to ensure you can easily back up your site or switch servers when required. 7. Advanced caching Cloudways offers various caching mechanisms for server optimization. Users can access a proprietary caching plugin called “Breeze,” which supports the Cloudways CDN. Other popular caching plugins like Redis and Varnish are also available. The cloud infrastructure from Cloudways is built on the technology of five different cloud providers – all of which are ranked among the most reliable companies in the world. The cloud partners offer VPS and dedicated servers for extra-fast performance. 8. Flexibility and scalability Cloudways hosting can adapt to suit your business. If your traffic starts to grow and you need to upgrade your server access, you can use the “Vertical Scaling” feature. This functionality allows Cloudways users to increase their hosting plans’ RAM, CPU, and storage features in a couple of clicks. As Cloudways follows the “pay as you go” pricing model, you’re also not tied to specific contracts. You pay only for what you use, and you can change
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8 Best Options for Managed WordPress Hosting Compared (2021)
[ad_1] Do you really need managed WordPress hosting? Let’s face it: Running a WordPress blog or site is no easy game. You have to take care of all the content, marketing, site design, social media, and so forth. But before you do that, you have to make sure your WordPress site is running smoothly and your current WordPress hosting provider isn’t giving you any headaches or issues. Today, most of the web hosting companies out there focus on providing affordable solutions. It costs you less than $5 to get an account with a shared hosting provider. And that’s a great solution if you’re just getting started. But for a medium-sized or business site going for high-quality WordPress hosting is a better alternative. By quality hosting, I mean managed WordPress hosting, which is specifically created for WordPress users. Managed WordPress hosting can help you get a faster-loading site and it also takes a load off your shoulders by handling a lot of the basic maintenance and performance optimization tasks for you. Yes – it costs more than cheap shared hosting, but that extra expense is worth it for most WordPress users because you get a lot more value. In this article, I am going to provide some basic information on the eight most trusted and best WordPress managed hosting services, so you can make an educated decision about what’s best for you and your business. In a Hurry? Our Top Three Picks for Managed WordPress Hosting To get a detailed look at all eight hosts, you should keep reading the full article. But if you’re in a hurry, here are the top three hosting providers I recommend (& why): Name Loads Under Suitable for (visits/ month) Cost WPEngine 0.26s 25,000 $25 Flywheel 1s 5,000 $15 🥇 WP Engine — WP Engine is for those who want a bit of everything. They are perfect is for you if want to scale without compromising the quality of support or losing developer-friendly tools, all while not spending a fortune. Don’t forget to use our special WP Engine coupon “wpkube20” to get 20% off. From $30 per month for one site. 🥈 Flywheel — Flywheel is the kind of host you wouldn’t want to change. They are perfect for bloggers, agencies, and small businesses. Flywheel has a ton of unique features such as billing transfer, demo site, and blueprint (a tool that basically allows you to create sites with default theme & plugin configurations of your choice). WPKube is also hosted on Flywheel. From $15 per month for one site. Want to see some other options? Keep reading to learn more about the benefits of managed WordPress hosting and get more detail on our eight recommended hosts… What is Managed WordPress Hosting? Managed WordPress hosting is specifically designed and optimized for WordPress websites. In other words, it takes care of all the technical aspects of WordPress for you, allowing you to focus on creating and sharing great content. You don’t have to worry about site updates, site speed, up-time, or anything like that. Many hosting companies use their own CDN and server-level caching, so you don’t have to rely on cache plugins such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. This type of hosting is perfect for those who don’t have any technical skills or time to manage a server. The Pros of Managed Hosting for WordPress Security – The main aim of premium managed hosting is to provide bulletproof security. They have a very tight layer of security on their servers, so you don’t have to worry about hacking, DDoS attacks, malware, or other security issues. Expert Support – It wouldn’t be fair to say that shared hosting providers have poor support. In fact, most companies have excellent staff who are well-trained and possess a good knowledge of WordPress. But they can’t assist you with things like performance, site functionality, WordPress errors, etc. With managed hosting support, you will get expert WordPress assistance, always. Speed – Speed plays a significant role in site rankings and there a lot of things you can do to improve it like implementing a caching plugin, using a content delivery network such as StackPath, and reducing image sizes. Most of the managed hosting companies out there enable content caching at the server level, so you don’t have to rely on any external caching plugins. If you’re going with a normal plan, then you might need to use a content delivery network to improve site speed. Daily Backups – They take a daily backup of your site including content, data, themes, and plugins, which you can then download from the dashboard. This can save you some money, especially if you are using a paid backup or maintenance service such as VaultPress or BlogVault. They also create a restore point. In case something goes wrong, you can easily restore your site to a previously working version with just one click. Automatic Updates – They will automatically update your WordPress Core files to the latest version, as soon as an update is released. You don’t have to pay someone extra to update your site anymore—your managed hosting provider does it for you. No Downtime – No matter how much traffic your site gets, it will never go down. That means, if you hit the homepage of Hacker News or Reddit, your site will still be up and running without any issues. The Cons of Managed Hosting for WordPress Expensive – There is a huge difference in the price of managed and shared hosting. An average shared hosting plan will cost you a mere $3.95 while a managed hosting plan will set you back $30 on average, though we’ll share some budget options below. Limitations – Basically, any plugin that consumes heavy resources isn’t allowed. They also do not allow any cache plugins including W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. Here’s the full list of disallowed plugins shared by most managed hosts. No cPanel – If you are moving from
Continue readingThe Best Managed WordPress Hosting (Learn Why)
[ad_1] If you’re searching for the best managed WordPress hosting, Kinsta is probably a name you’ve come across. There’s a reason for that – Kinsta is one of, if not the, best managed WordPress hosts in 2021. The objective data backs that up, with Kinsta consistently leading the pack in data from review aggregators and third-party surveys. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves – to help you decide whether Kinsta is the best host for you, we’ll take you through some of its pros and cons and make some recommendations for how to pick the best host for your needs. By the end, you should have a better idea of the best hosting solution for your site, whether that’s Kinsta or another option. Quick Summary of Our 2021 Kinsta Review If you’re in a hurry, here’s a quick rundown on how Kinsta is doing in 2021… Simply put, Kinsta is one of the best options for managed WordPress hosting. Kinsta hits all the important things you need in a host with fast performance, rock-solid reliability, excellent 24/7 support, and convenient features. This is why, when we aggregated data from third-party sources like TrustPilot, WhoIsHostingThis, CodeinWP’s survey, and Review Signal, Kinsta was #1 out of all the hosts we looked at with an impressive 96% satisfaction rating across all those sources. Here’s the aggregated data for popular hosts: You can see that Kinsta leads the pack, even beating out similarly-priced hosts like WP Engine and Flywheel. So – to learn why Kinsta has such satisfied customers, let’s dig into the pros and cons. Five Things Kinsta Does Really Well Let’s start with the best parts of hosting with Kinsta.. Objectively Great Performance One of Kinsta’s biggest advantages is that it offers excellent performance, which is the most important consideration in any WordPress host. To objectively assess a host’s performance, we rely on Review Signal’s exhaustive performance benchmarks, which challenge hosts in a variety of ways including some pretty heavy-duty load testing. Though Kinsta didn’t participate in the most recent 2020 Review Signal benchmarks, Kinsta was a regular participant in the prior years. In the 2019 benchmarks, Kinsta participated in five different pricing tiers: $25-$50 per month $51-$100 per month $101-$200 per month $201-$500 per month $500 per month (enterprise) Kinsta earned Top Tier status (the highest designation) in every single tier. That means Kinsta earned Top Tier from its $30 per month starter plan all the way up to its enterprise plans, which is pretty impressive. So what’s behind that Top Tier performance? Kinsta runs the following stack: Google Cloud infrastructure with your choice of 25+ data centers spread around the world. Pure Nginx. MariaDB. Server-level caching with Nginx Fast_CGI cache, along with a custom companion plugin to purge the cache from your WordPress dashboard. Built-in CDN powered by KeyCDN. Automatic database optimization once per week. For advanced users, Kinsta also offers free Application Performance Monitoring to really dig into your site’s performance at a more technical level. This tool aims to fill the same role as premium monitoring services like New Relic without forcing you to pay an extra fee or integrate a third-party service. Kinsta also offers some useful guides on how you can use these features to improve performance for WooCommerce stores and membership sites. Top-Notch Live Chat Support Kinsta offers excellent live chat support that’s available 24/7 via the user-friendly Intercom widget. You can get help from anywhere in your dashboard just by opening the widget, and all of your chat histories are automatically saved. You can also click around to different areas of your dashboard without losing your chat, which is surprisingly useful: As for support quality – it really is good and the support team knows their way around WordPress. For example, in CodeinWP’s 2018 hosting survey, CodeinWP asked users to rate their hosts’ overall support and WordPress-specific support (out of five). Kinsta scored 4.9 on both metrics, which was good for first place out of all the hosts that respondents were using. If you’re wondering, WP Engine was second at 4.7 for both, while Flywheel had 4.6 for overall support and 4.8 for WordPress-specific support. Convenient Managed WordPress Features Kinsta is a true managed WordPress host, so you get all those convenient managed WordPress features to make your life easier. Basically, you’ll have a partner that works to make your site more reliable, secure, and quick-loading. I already covered what Kinsta does on the performance front – you won’t have to worry about configuring caching or a CDN because Kinsta handles all that for you. On the security front, Kinsta implements: A WAF (web application firewall) to proactively stop threats. Daily malware scans. Uptime monitoring to automatically detect issues on your site. Free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt. If something does happen to your site, Kinsta also offers a free hack fix guarantee to get your site working again. To keep your site’s data safe, Kinsta offers automatic daily backups with 14 days of storage. If you want more frequent backups, you can pay $50/month/site for backups every six hours or $100/month/site for backups every hour. There’s also an external backup add-on to send your backups to your own Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage account, which costs $2/month/site + $1/GB bandwidth. Finally, you also get staging sites to safely test changes to your site and then push them live with a single click. Well-Designed Custom Dashboard and Useful Tools Like many other managed WordPress hosts, Kinsta uses its own custom hosting dashboard rather than a pre-built dashboard like cPanel or Plesk. What stands out about Kinsta’s dashboard, though, is that it’s really well-designed and user-friendly. You’ll be able to easily manage things like backups, staging sites, etc. You also get some useful tools, such as dedicated tools to enable WordPress debug mode with a single click or run a search/replace on your site’s database without the need for a plugin: If you’re working as part of a team, you’ll also get different
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