Link: https://www.cloudways.com/en/?id=925406
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Cloud-based web hosting services are now common, but Cloudways does several interesting things with its cloud hosting that make it stand out in a growing field. It lets you select from one of five platforms, including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, offers wallet-friendly pay-as-you-go plans, and even lets you sign up for a trial run without whipping out a credit card. The shine is dulled a bit by its lack of amenities, such as domain registration and included email. Still, this excellent cloud hosting service is well worth considering.
Getting Started
Unlike most other web hosting services, Cloudways lets you build a site without spending a dime. You can sign up for a three-day trial account by creating a username and password, or logging in using either Github, Google, or LinkdedIn credentials, which is a nice touch. After you've logged in, you're tasked with selecting a content management system (CMS) from several popular and respected sources, including Drupal, Joomla, Koken, Magento, Media Wiki, PHP Stack, Prestashop, and, of course, WordPress. There's a lot of flexibility on display here. Cloud Hosting Plans
Cloudways leverages the resources of several clustered servers to balance your website load; it doesn't dabble at all in the traditional shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting plans. Instead, the company offers several pay-as-you-go, hourly cloud hosting packages that only charge you for the amount of time you've used. For example, if you cancel a plan while 10 days into a month, you'll only be charged for 10 days' worth of hosting. Hosts like the Editors' Choice award-winning DreamHost and HostGator bill you for the entire month, even if you cancel just a week into the cycle. Cloudways offers traditional monthly billing, too.
The monthly web hosting plans start at $10 (for 25GB of storage, 1TB of monthly data transfers, 1GB of RAM, and a single-core processor) and scale upward to $1,035 (for 3840GB of storage, 12TB of month data transfers, 192GB of RAM, and a 32-core processor.) The high-end offering outclasses many web hosts' most powerful dedicated server plans. In fact, Cloudways' top-level specs have more in common with the SMB-friendly Liquid Web, which lets you outfit a server with an wild 512GB of RAM. If you prefer hourly billing, the aforementioned plans start at just over $0.01 and scale up to slightly more than $1.43. Some Omissions
Unfortunately, Cloudways doesn't offer domain registration, so you have to secure a domain from NameCheap or some other seller. Another URL-related downside: Cloudways' unusually designed back end makes it a chore to point that purchased URL to your hosting setup. I didn't have much issue connecting those dots upon exploring the online documentation, but the process may prove confusing to novices. Furthermore, unless they're dead set on Cloudways, I can definitely see users simply never returning if they have to go elsewhere just to get started. The service's email offering is another issue worth noting, as Cloudways' plans come with zero electronic mail accounts. Instead, Cloudways—in conjunction with RackSpace—expects you to pay for your email at a $1 per email account per month. That may prove costly, depending on your needs. Most other web hosts provide at least some level of service as part of even the most basic plan.
Building a Website
Cloudways may not possess some of the typical web hosting elements, but building a site is a fairly straightforward affair. WordPress was my CMS of choice in testing, and the service created a server in just seven minutes. I logged in with my Cloudways credentials, selected a theme, tweaked how pages and posts appeared, and added images. It was a trouble-free experience.
This particular WordPress flavor is of the managed variety, so your installation receives the white-glove treatment by auto-updating the CMS, performing automatic daily backups, and providing real-time site monitoring and WordPress-specific security. Cloudways also has useful one-click cloning (so you can quickly create duplicates of your apps and servers) and staging areas (so you can test website elements without placing them live on your site).
Cloudways lets customers separately monitor the applications hosted on a server. This application-level monitoring has two sections: Analytics and Logs. Analytics displays traffic information, PHP requests, MySQL requests, and Disk Usage. Logs, on the other hand, show your website's access log and error log.