The world of hosting has grown dramatically in recent years with a number of offers that seems to exceed demand. This has made this sector one of the most competitive in the industry, having to constantly innovate to stay current.
Hosting is something that will always be needed, from a small project to a massive business project that incorporates hundreds of servers and infrastructure, the demand will always be there.
In this series of articles that we inaugurate at TecnoGaming we are going to evaluate, one by one, several of the most popular hosting services on the market, we are going to show you how they work, what your control panel looks like, what capabilities they have, for which oriented and what is its performance.
We are going to begin our odyssey with Cloudways, a hosting service that comes to function more than anything as a Service Service. Cloudways is not itself a hosting company, but rather a service management provider. At Cloudways you can register to manage a series of highly recognized Cloud services, such as DigitalOcean, VULTR, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Kyup.
Cloudways will allow you to create virtual machines and applications in a very transparent and fast way in any of these services or in several different ones at the same time and to manage all your virtual machines and applications from a centralized control panel.
Cloudways looks like this once you sign up for the service. Here you can create your first virtual machine and proceed to install your first application.
The powerful interface of Cloudways allows you to choose from the full range of Cloud service providers and to configure the type of services of the virtual machine.
For our analysis we are going to create two virtual machines, one in Amazon Web Services and the other in DigitalOcean.
Once the virtual machine is created, we can access the application menu and easily create a WordPress application. The virtual server will be configured with all the necessary files from the webserver and database so that you do not have to do absolutely nothing once everything is ready.
Although Cloudways allows you to modify almost all the most important options that make up the web server via its interface, this is not necessary since it comes pre-configured with optimal values for its proper functioning. In fact, Cloudways has a built-in WordPress installation with cache plugins pre-installed and configured to take advantage of the webserver structure that comes built in the virtual machine.
If your project requires more resources, the possibility of scaling it vertically is super practical, simply by pressing a button your virtual machine will have more capacity which allows any project, startup or blog to increase its capacity easily and efficiently without having to resort to any technical option.
No hosting service would be complete without the option of Backups and here Cloudways offers a very simple configuration that allows you to put together a frequent backup day, week and month and with a retention to your liking. It will also allow you the option of preserving the local backup.
The webserver that Cloudways brings by default is very complete, using Apache and Nginx as webservers and proxy and even Varnish in conjunction with cache plugins to speed up WordPress.
If your website needs a certificate, you no longer need to buy one since Cloudways allows you to create one automatically.
As if all this were not enough, all the virtual machines that you create in the service will be able to be handled very easily from the lower right keypad that allows you, among other things, to turn on the virtual machine, turn it off, transfer it to another server, clone it or add an application to it. new.
If you are worried about how to migrate your current site to Cloudways, that is not a problem, through a Cloudways application for automatic migration WordPress, which you must install in the WordPress you want to migrate and using the Cloudways BlogVault, you can migrate all your web automatically. You just have to take into account that the process is quite slow and for a website that weighs several gigabytes it may take even several hours, you will have to be patient.
The Techie Blog Benchmark Site
Testing a hosting service is not an easy task, because basically you cannot go out and compare the services with a universal benchmark, there is no such thing.
This is why here at TecnoGaming we have devised our own benchmark. It is a website tailor-made to require any hosting service with assets ranging from small files of only 2Kb in size to large files with heavy images that exceed 700Kb, all this mixed with various development plugins, the Divi framework and various galleries. The initial site that we will use carries the domain of thetechieblog and is located in our own Elysium Servkers Hosting service .
Benchmark Site at ESH
For these tests, we are going to configure two additional subdomains to the benchmark blog domain thetechieblog which will be cloudwaysdo and cloudwaysamazon .
Results
First we will evaluate the result of the VM in DigitalOcean
As you can see, the webserver accepts a gzip connection and uses nginx.
The result is great, with a response time of 1.44s on a site that weighs 2.8MB.
If you want to make your own comparisons, you can use the direct link of this site while the hosting provider keeps our test account active.
Benchmark Site at DigitalOcean
Amazon
Let’s see now what Amazon Web Services looks like from Cloudways.
Excellent result once again, from Dallas.
Testing now from San Jose we see a surprising result of only 493ms proving that the virtual machines created and configured by Cloudways respond perfectly even when we have not used the WordPress optimizations included in the service.
To make your own comparisons of the Amazon Web Services virtual machine, you can use the following link
Benchmark Site at Amazon Web Services
The good
Cloudways is an exceptional option to manage your hosting requirements that adapts to any type of audience, from a novice to an expert, being able to access even the VM with root access from the same interface, control its most important values without having to touch a configuration line or do not touch anything and use it as it comes, the service is so easy to adapt to the requirements of each client that it becomes the dream of any entrepreneur, developer or blogger who wants to manage their websites in a clear way And simple.
The bad
Anyway, Cloudways suggests a minimum knowledge of how a webserver works to be able to use its services, however, you will not know what is being talked about. For those who have never used a service outside of cPanel, perhaps Cloudways is not ideal.
On the other hand, there is no perfect hosting where everything is wonderful, there always has to be a balance and in the case of Cloudways it is in its price.Acquiring a VM from Cloudways will be much more expensive than if you do it with the providers that Cloudways offers directly. For example, if you hire a VM in DigitalOcean you will end up paying a minimum of USD10 where in Cloudways the same managed virtual machine will cost you USD17. The cost increase is given by the same interface and extra administration that Cloudways offers you. This may not seem like much, but as soon as your project begins to use more resources, vertical scaling will cost you much more than you expect, to the point that scaling above 4Gb will be much more expensive than acquiring a more dedicated server. powerful, of course, without its respective administration.
Conclusion
It is an expensive service, it is. Is it worth it, without a doubt. Its powerful interface, its centralized administration facility and the great variety of options make Cloudways an excellent service that is worth the added cost. There are only two contraindications to its use and this is: users who have almost no knowledge of how a webserver works, all those will be better off with a cPanel-based shared hosting service and advanced users who have enough knowledge to manage a server. on your own and you will see the cost of the service excessive because you can save a lot of money simply by hiring more powerful dedicated servers for less cost.
For the intermediate band of users where the basic knowledge is and who do not feel like having to deal with hardware, breaks, failures, backups and who like a centralized system that saves them from having to go looking for their hosting acco
