Cloudways is a managed cloud based Web Hosting service. It is a fast and cost effective solution to your web hosting problems. As you know cloud id fast becoming the most popular form of web hosting and Cloudways provides managed cloud services from the very best of cloud platforms that are available in the market today. It is providing infrastructure as a platform from many cloud platforms including Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, KYUP and Vultr.

Cloudways Hosting Partners

 In this guide we explain how Cloudways work, how to sign up for it and how to start working or migrating your website on Cloudways.

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How Cloudways Platform work?

In order to understand the true potential of Cloudways, you have to understand what working goes behind it. It is a cloud based web hosting service so all the resources are placed on the cloud and are shared by everyone using these services. Although the cloud works on the principal of sharing the resources, it does not have the limitations of shared web hosting.

Here you have the pay as you go option which will let you pay only for the resources that you will consume. Because of the cloud, scalability is not an issue. When you see that there is traffic coming on your page you can change your plan and request for more space and vice versa. It supports a number of Apps platforms.

Here is a complete list of Apps on which it provides hosting services.

• Magento
• WordPress
• WooCommerce
• Drupal
• Jhoomla
• Laravel hosting
• PHP based hosting
• Prestashop

Cloudways Supporting Applications

If you have a site based on any of the above platforms, you can easily migrate them to Cloudways.

A Little About Cloudways Background

It was founded in 2011, by four young professionals, Pere Hospital, Uzair Gadit, Umair Gadit and Aquib Gadit. It is based in Malta, having offices in UAE and Spain. The company has over 50 employs. It is a group of dedicated individuals who are striving to provide the best hosting services at optimum rates.

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Cloudways Platform Pricing and Packages

There is a wide variety in pricing as there are different IaaS available by Cloudways. To begin with you can start off with a free trial of three days, there are no credit cards required and absolutely no commitments need to be made. The packages will start from $ 7 per month to as high as $ 1,974 per month. Depending upon the bandwidth, processing speed and size of RAM required, and the package will increase in price. The prices of packages are greatest for Amazon IaaS. Google Cloud services and Digital Ocean are relatively cheaper but once you consider the quality of services all the IaaS are quite competitive.

After that you can choose your payment package. Once the payment is done, you can start uploading your web pages on the Cloudways server. If you have a website already, you can migrate it to Cloudways.

With all the packages you get these three benefits

• The migration of first website on every account if free of cost.
• There is an unlimited amount of installation of applications facility.
• There is an excellent 24 by 7 customer service support available.

Here are the pricing packages recommended by Cloudways that according to them are their best and most efficient offerings.

Best Packages if you want Digital Ocean

Best Packages if you want to subscribe to Amazon Cloud services

Best Packages if you want to work on Google Cloud Platform

Best Packages if you want KYUP as you IaaS

Best Packages if you want to subscribe to Vultr’s monthly package

You can check the detailed pricing on their webpage.

Signing up for Cloudways

Now let us see how you can create an account and start working on the Cloudways platform.

• Click Start Free to literally start free. You will see this screen.

provide the sign in information and press Start Free to continue to the next screen.

• In the next step you are directed to start a chat session, where your email and domain name is asked. Even if you do not have a domain name yet, you can create an account and add domain name later.

Once the chat starts tell the support team member you want to sign up for free trial.

• An email will be sent to your account and in order to activate the account, click on the link provided in the email. The email will comprise of the following body.

• Complete the verification by clicking on the link and you will be directed to your newly created account.

Select the application that you want to install from a long list of available applications.

• Next you are urged to provide user friendly names to your server, Application manager and project. Remember to give meaning full names. Also if you want to install a number of applications then name them in such a way that you remember which project is within which application.

• Now this is the most important step in your sign up process. Here you provide all the details regarding your Cloudways account. First select the IaaS that you will be using to support your application. Secondly you provide the details about your server size bandwidth and application size requirements.

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• There is a very useful bar at the bottom of the page that tells how much is the cost of the your per month package. The cost will increase and decrease as you change the specifications.
• Once you have completed the information click on the launch button to start your server. Now it might take sometime before the server launched. You will see the screen that have the following actions

You can start uploading your webpages to the server or you an migrate an existing site onto the Cloudways account. the migration process wil be explained in the next section. Here there are actions like restart the server, stop the server, Add application and even create a server clone. You can see the number of applications and projects on the server too.

Cloudways Website migrator plugin

Remember the first migration is free so why wait. Just as you have set up the account start with migrating your first website on Cloudways. It can be done easily. Here is the step by step process. In the example we migrate a WordPress site to Cloudways, the process is almost similar to all the other platforms too.

Here are the steps to carry out the process of migration.

• Once you have a running Cloudways account, login to your WordPress account.
• In the tool bar click on the plugins.
• On the plugins page search for the plugin Cloudways WordPress migrator. Once you find the plugin install it.
• After the installation, click on the activate now button and then select the settings options.
• In the settings option provide all the details required. If you are the master owner of your server, use master credentials and if you are a team member then you can use your application credentials.
• Make sure you have SFTP username, password and destination URL.
• After filling out all the fields click migrate. The average migrate takes around 1 to 4 hours for a site of size 500 MB to 1 GB.
• Once the migration is complete following confirmation message is shown.

Here is a video tutorial of using Cloudways Migrator Plugin to migrate your website on the Cloudways platform.

Cloudways Elastic Email Add-on

The email add on is very easy to be installed in Cloudways. There are few simple steps in which you can add this option to your application without getting into the details of the mechanics behind it.

Here are the simple steps that you can follow to make your Cloudways platform start sending and receiving emails.

• Login to you server, onto which you want to deploy this feature.
• Click on the Add on button to show the available Add on options.

• Select the Elastic Email Add-on. Click the Pencil to edit the package details. You can choose from many available packages, the package that you require for your website. After choosing the right package, click on subscribe.
• Once you have subscribed, the status of the add-on will go in the pending mode. And once approved by the Cloudways team, it will be activated.

Data Centers Around The Globe

Cloudways have 41 data centers around the globe. Their stretches to countries like India, Japan, Singapore and Canada. The presence of all these data centers around the globe gives users the best optimum experience for their websites. It increases the efficiency of their websites manifold to find a data center server in a location that is near to where they are deployed. There are a number of perks that an organization can garner if the Data center is located in an area near you.

Cloudways is not stopping there. They plan to acquire even more data centers over time.

24 x 7 Customer Support Service

You can find a number of reviews about Cloudways online and all of them, praise their team for the excellent support services. You can easily start up a chat with any of the persons available, within seconds, you will start receiving replies from live human support. It is my personal experience too, that chat support is very helpful and prompt. You log in your complaint and Cloudways are quick to respond and fix the issue that has been causing you trouble, so you can continue your bug free experience with Cloudways.

CloudwaysBot

There is also a CloudwaysBot that is there to find solutions to all your problems. You can struck up a conversation with the Bot and you will get answer to your queries and issues without the hassle of going through long manuals, documentation or FAQs.

It functions as a smart assistant that uses artificial intelligence to assist you in optimizing your apps and your server for better performance. It has another use too and Real-time updates are sent to the channel of your choice (email or text, for instance) on the schedule you designate.

Affiliate Program

There is a very beneficial affiliate program also related to Cloudways. It can enable you to earn 1250 per customer in ideal circumstances. The customers will be given the support services and resources of Cloudways. The affiliate program is extremely hassle free, just join and start earning. There is a 10% recurring bonus too. There is also a 10% bonus for the whole year. Whenever there is a direct paid conversion, you will straightaway get $ 25. Here is a profit plan for the affiliate program of Cloudways.

The Revenue Plan for the affiliates of Cloudways

A very helpful and instructive Blog Support

Cloudways has definitely tried their best to provide their customers with the best user help and support in every way possible. There is a very extensive Blog on various topics that might benefit you in your web hosting and application management. The motto of their blog is Read, Learn, Grow, Repeat. Depending on this motto, Cloudways provide free of cost guides in topics like, Best Magento Optimization Tips for your web store, Integrate Twig and Structural components – Drupal 8 theming tutorial, How to add information, product images, SKUs to Woocommerce order email and How you can sell your E-Learning courses on WordPress using Edwiser. The list is very long and visit the Cloudways Blog page to know about the detailed topics covered.

Other useful features offered by Cloudways

Cloudways provide tons of different features both on server management and application management front. The great thing about cloudways is most of the features are one click away. The one click motto is what makes Cloudways a great platform for amateur users to work with ease and confidence.

This is a brief and up to date review of Cloudways, a managed  cloud platform. If you are looking for an optimum web hosting service, that is cost effective and very efficient. It will increase the page response time and will keep things hassle free. There are no long commitments required, if you are not interested to continue the service, you can easily unsubscribe whenever you want.

Which Web hosting service are you using? Share with us your experience by commenting below.

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