Managed Hosting for E-commerce: 10 Benefits of Using Cloudways

There are 10 benefits of using Cloudways, which is regarded as the best managed hosting for E-commerce websites. I’ll be happy to identify these benefits for you but first, let me define what managed hosting is and elaborate on what Cloudways is.

What does managed hosting mean?

According to TechTarget, managed hosting is a service that leases a dedicated network hardware, server, system software, storage, and operating system to a company and manages it on its behalf for a certain length of time. The service entails setting up the software and hardware according to the hosting configurations of the company’s website.

The company is able to access the leased equipment and software in an administrative capacity using a web-based connection. The company would be able to take full control of the hosting and have greater management and security for it since the equipment and software are solely dedicated to them. This is while getting hands-on technical support for their website’s storage needs.

Managed hosting often runs on a cloud platform or technology, which 2022 statistics have shown to improve customer experience by 49% since it allows faster deployment of the latest services and products by 44%.

There are actually four types of managed hosting, as per HelixStorm: full, semi, email, and app. Fully managed hosting services require from the company or lessee very little involvement to none at all. Semi-managed hosting, on the other hand, enables the company or lessee the ability to co-run their website’s server operations along with the managed hosting provider.

On the other hand, managed email hosting simply outsources the operation, maintenance, protection, and troubleshooting of the company’s email server and support. Managed app hosting involves the operation, maintenance, protection, and troubleshooting of the company’s apps for its website.

Not everybody may find managed hosting appealing for their website. But it is most beneficial to financial and medical companies since they need to maintain compliance with industry and government standards for their daily operations and business infrastructure.

Other businesses that benefit from managed hosting are those that desire to have a competitive edge, and a predictable and controlled budget, are highly concerned about physical and virtual security such as e-commerce businesses, and that find having an information technology team or management time-consuming.

There are several providers of managed hosting. These are, according to the top 10 list of managed hosting providers I made, Bluehost, WP Engine, A2 Hosting, Hostinger, Dreamhost, Cloudways, SiteGround, WPX, Kinsta, and Hostgator.

Now that you have more thorough information on what managed hosting is, let me focus on Cloudways next.

What is Cloudways?

Cloudways, as just discussed, is one of the many providers of managed hosting. Based on my review, Cloudways ranked #6 when compared to the rest of the renowned managed hosting providers. This ranking is based on its cost, pros, cons, and customer support.

What’s great about Cloudways is it allows companies to host 1 website with a free SSL certificate and migration at a monthly rate of $10. This already includes a CDN add-on, staging environment, advanced caches, and 24/7 real-time technical support and monitoring.

Despite not having a free domain name, Cloudways still fared a 4.8/5 Trustpilot rating since it has a big bandwidth (1TB) that allows faster load times of 330ms on top of superb customer support.

Let me now go into detail on Cloudway’s benefits, especially for a business engaged with e-commerce.

The 10 benefits of using Cloudways for E-commerce

1. Super easy to use

Cloudways is easy to use since it provides lessees the ability to control their hosting through an interface packed with advanced features. These features range from installing a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate, monitoring website statistics, implementing bot protection, and backing up or restoring website data to migrating the website to a new cloud platform.

In addition, Cloudways makes it easy for website owners and managers to install plugins, handle backups, perform updates, and manage applications in lesser time than other hosting providers would allow due to their intuitive interface.

Forbes even highlighted that it allows lessees the ability to monitor 15 variables, which includes website traffic monitoring that is most useful when one is anticipating a surge in it. The interface just makes it very easy to manage the hosting since everything could be done with a click of a button.

The interface is also not only easy to use but also easy to learn. A day is enough to learn its interface, helping lessees immediately move forward with what they need to do with the website without the need for training.

Although, Forbes said, non-techie people would still need to use aid for this. But no need to fret since they have a live chat and a knowledge base to look at for reference on how to go about using their interface, which is sometimes called the dashboard.

Cloudways is also an easy way to set up an eCommerce website in minutes. Running the eCommerce site is equally easy since you don’t really need to monitor it daily or backup its contents regularly on your own since Cloudways is a managed hosting—someone else does it for you.

2. Faster Loading Time

Cloudways help greatly improve the loading time of the website. According to H Grant Designs Chief Executive Officer Howard Spaeth, the problem their website encountered in its loading time was immediately resolved when they moved their hosting platform to Cloudways.

He cited that his colleague who owned a GoDaddy website similarly experience the same thing. His colleague’s website used to have a loading time of 30 seconds, which dropped to 7 seconds with Cloudways. Yet the website hasn’t been optimized yet since the loading time with Cloudways is 330mms.

Another reason Cloudways enables websites to have loading speeds is its feature of optimization. GeekFlare explains that Cloudways is able to provide a fast and reliable experience because they completely manage the backend stack of the website. This enables them to fine-tune the server with more flexibility.

3. Flexible platform

What makes Cloudways flexible is its provision for lessees to choose the cloud platform they deem more suitable for them. There are five cloud platforms available to choose from in Cloudways: AWS, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud Platform, Linode, and Vultr.

All these platforms are exceptional and choosing the right one for your business is dependent on the requirements of your website, budget, and goals. Karl Taylor Education Founder Karl Taylor in a testimonial for Cloudways pointed out that you can even switch between these platforms at any time without any difficulty.

Plus, you can even choose a server location in any part of the world since Cloudways has 63 data centers that enable you to bring your server closer to customers and provide them with a faster, high-performing website.

Cloudways is specially catered to e-commerce businesses with features to give them an edge over the competition. The hosting is capable of Magento and WooCommerce–renowned eCommerce platforms—integration with payment gateway support that streamlines online operations, especially for startups.

Startups can even expand the resources of their website as their business grows without having to move to another hosting provider since Cloudways has provisions for this. This is just how flexible Cloudways is. (Here’s a listing of the best Cloudways websites for a better appreciation of loading speed and high-end performance.)

4. High-end features

WordPress users favor Cloudways over other managed hosting providers due to its customer-centric and advanced features. These features include vertical scaling, pre-installed object cache pro, a staging environment, dedicated firewalls, auto-healing, SSH and SFTP access, automated backups, and a Cloudflare add-on. They exclude having regular security patching, HTTP/s enabled servers, Core processors, up to 5TB bandwidth, up to 8GB RAM, and an object cache pro for Premium plans.

Personally, more than 1TB bandwidth and fast loading time are what I liked most about Cloudways along with their free migration and free SSL certificate. Then there’s also its feature of being compatible with most applications needed by the website for its features and functions.

Cloudways can support a variety of applications such as Content Management System (CMS) Guides like CraftCMS, Typo3, Concrete 5, Kontent, ButterCMS, and more; for deployment, and other PHP-based applications used online.

Another high-end feature of Cloudways that make it suitable for eCommerce businesses is its focus on security. That’s security for data, common protection from threats, security patches, and other protocols and measures to assure small businesses and their customers of their safety from online thefts, hacking, and phishing.

5. SEO compliant

Cloudways is SEO-ready on top of its user-friendliness and responsive design. D8 Super Store Co-founder Sol Lee underscored in a testimonial for Cloudways that moving to them increased the SEO effectiveness of their website, which is brought by the 6.5% increase in their conversion rate.

Lee elaborated that Cloudway’s ability to reduce downtime has cut their load time by 50%, which in turn helps increase their SEO ranking especially in Google. Cloudways actually highlights being SEO-friendly as one of its features. SEO hosting, they explained, is something they can easily assure because websites load faster through their managed hosting services.

Accordingly, Cloudways guarantees SERP rankings to skyrocket through their ThunderStack. They also cite being able to provide a dedicated IP, managed security, faster loading times, free SSL certificates, and an optimized stack as the main reason websites load faster.

6. Cost Effective

With the features they provide, Cloudways asks for the lowest prices for cloud-managed web hosting. They also have a “Pay As You Go” payment method that only bills the lessee for the actual amount of days their hosting services were used. Their hosting plans are also progressive and let you start with as little as $14 per month. While the variety of platforms they offer saves the lessee from acquiring separate hosting services for their website and just having it in one place. Thus, making Cloudways more cost-effective.

7. Better website performance

Cloudways also assures better website performance since the capacity of their servers along with high-end features mean lesser downtime issues. Long-time lessees of Cloudways attest that their website is 99% up and working all the time.

As mentioned previously, better SEO optimization means better site traffic and higher conversion rates. Faster loading time means happier website visitors and better conversions. Unlike shared hosting, Cloudways is reliable and provides great cloud platforms to make website management easier and site performance better.

Their various data centers across the world from Asia to Europe also enable Cloudways to provide better-performing websites for their lessees. While their CDN installation enables the website to unload the server in a few seconds without having to configure it. This feature optimizes site performance along with its PHP-FPM preconfigured handler.

8. Improved customer service

Many users of Cloudways attest to being able to provide better service to their customers through their website. A reliable and efficient running server assures customers that the website is there whenever and wherever they need to access it for purchasing transactions or even for simply browsing it. Customers also would not encounter downtimes while purchasing, especially in the middle of paying for a transaction that may lead to card transaction problems such as double posting.

9. Higher income

At the end of the day, a good-performing website will always lead to higher income for the company. That means higher conversion rates through the website, repeat purchases for happy customers, and big savings on website maintenance.

This is exactly what D8’s Lee experienced with their eCommerce website. The website generated $1M in sales when they moved to Cloudways. This was the result of achieving their target conversion rate of 6.5% and projected $5M in revenue in a span of a year.

10. Reliable technical support

Cloudways is renowned to have reliable technical support. In fact, it is one of the most loved features of lessees when it comes to Cloudways. Their 24/7 technical support progresses in superb service according to the subscription plan a company has signed up for with them. Cloudways has a dedicated support team that enables them to address technical problems immediately.

Their customer support actually ranks 4.8/5 on Trustpilot based on more than 1,000 reviews. I personally rated them with a fiver star for their customer support.

In Conclusion

Cloudways is a one-of-a-kind managed hosting service in a cloud platform. Their various features have garnered hundreds of positive reviews from customers since they began in early 2000. At the end of the day, their great performance and ease of monitoring have allowed business owners more time to focus on their operations and attend to their daily needs minus the fuss or worry.

FAQs

1. I am not very familiar with hosting services, can you refer me to other posts you have written on this?

Glad to! To begin with, you could check the review I made on the “10 Best Web Hosting Services in 2023,” which is based on my own testing of their services. This aforementioned post is best read with “Website Hosting Statistics,” which has 31 mind-blowing numbers every startup and business needs to look into. Finally, you could also look into the top three things startups should know if their website is made in Elementor and they intend to host it in a cloud platform.

2. Is there a downside to using Cloudways?

Well, no hosting service is perfect. So, yes, there is a downside to using Cloudways. For one, they do not assist businesses in getting a domain name. This is something you have to get from another provider. They also do not have an email server or hosting feature for the business. Finally, according to Forbes, the depth of the technical support they provide is dependent on the plan a business has subscribed to. Full technical support comes with their more expensive plans. But, nonetheless, I gave them a 5-star rating since their benefits outweigh their downside.