WooCommerce Hosting: Here’s Why You Should Choose Cloudways?

Being one of the best WooCommerce plugin providers, our customers usually inquire about the hosting providers that are fully compatible with our products. Back in 2019, we wrote an extensive guide and mentioned some of the most renowned WooCommerce hosting providers. 

For now, let’s start with the importance of a WooCommerce hosting provider.

A web hosting provider is just like your business partner. If they are not reliable and go down frequently, it will harm your business. A good WooCommerce hosting provider, on the other hand, offers an optimized and secure hosting stack, reliability, and support when needed.

There are a number of factors to consider while choosing your WooCommerce hosting partner. Let’s take a look at them.

If one WooCommerce hosting provider works well for someone, it doesn’t mean that it will work for you too; it mostly depends on how you set up your store environment.

So, let’s start with the basics by listing down the requirements:

• Gathering Requirements

Gathering your requirements plays a vital role in choosing an eCommerce hosting that fits your needs. You must list down your customer’s entire journey from a single page visit until they buy your product. Considering the workflow, list down all the tools, themes, and plugins you’ll need.

• Compatibility

Once you’re done with the requirements, it’s time to check compatibility with different WooCommerce hosting providers. This will help filter out the hosting providers that you can opt for.

• Scalability

After some time when your business grows, you’ll need bigger servers to support your website. It’d be a big NO to reconsider your hosting choice at that time. This is why we suggest choosing a hosting solution that offers scalability so that you can always scale up your WooCommerce hosting as your business grows.

• Flexibility

We always suggest starting with a flexible hosting provider that offers choice and simplicity so that you can adjust according to your business needs as and when required. Some of the most renowned managed WordPress hosting providers lock you down with their preferred themes and plugins, and those hosting are the ones you should avoid.

• Reliable & High-availability

Since the last couple of years, cloud hosting is considered one of the most reliable and highly available solutions as compared to traditional shared, dedicated, and VPS hosting. Thanks to the cloud hosting architecture. Therefore, we encourage our customers to look for a cloud server.

• Secure

Security is another important thing to consider when you are in an eCommerce industry. It starts from your hosting till the time your customer buys a product. You need to ensure that data transmission is secure and private. This is why almost all of the WooCommerce hosting providers offer an SSL certificate that ensures the transmitted data is encrypted.

• Performance

A lot of studies say that you have only 7-8 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention. What if your store takes 3-4 seconds to load, how can you expect that a visitor would trust your store? Just like security, the performance also starts from your hosting provider and then applies on-site optimization techniques for better performance.

• Budget-friendly

Considering all of the above factors, you might be worried about the budget as well. A basic WooCommerce store can cost you from $10 to $20 a month keeping in mind that it covers all the aspects mentioned above. Do not compromise on your hosting budget because saving a few dollars on hosting can hurt you in the long-run.

As mentioned above, cloud hosting is considered as the most reliable, scalable, and optimized hosting solutions for your WooCommerce store.

However, you have two options when it comes to Cloud hosting: either get a cloud server directly from Google, Amazon, and DigitalOcean, etc., and manage it by yourself or outsource the hosting hassles to a managed cloud provider. The choice is YOURS!

If you go for an unmanaged cloud provider, you need to learn the sysadmin stuff or hire a high-paid sysadmin to look after your cloud server from deployment to maintenance.

But if you go for a managed cloud provider, you basically outsource the hosting management hassles to a company that takes care of your server for a few bucks extra. This means you can focus on growing your business while enjoying the complete benefits of cloud hosting.

We believe in outsourcing as it allows us to focus on what we do best.

This is why we chose a managed cloud hosting provider, Cloudways, that you must have seen in our other WooCommerce hosting guides.

Long story short, we had been struggling to choose a hosting provider that best fits our needs, and back in 2019, we ended up choosing Cloudways, a specialized WooCommerce hosting platform.

It’s been a year or so, and now we recommend them to all our customers for better performance and reliability.

Let’s explore what Cloudways really is.

Well, Cloudways works a bit differently as compared to other WooCommerce hosting providers. It wouldn’t be wrong to say they act as a middle-man between YOU and cloud infrastructure providers like Google and Amazon.

Highlighted Features

Here are some of the key features that Cloudways offers to their ecommerce customers:

• Renowned Cloud Providers
• Dedicated Server Resources
• Multiple Applications
• Unlimited Applications on a Single Server
• 60+ Global Data-centers
• 1-click Free SSL Certificate
• Optimized Hosting Stack
• Multiple Layer Security
• Server & Application Cloning
• Server & Application Monitoring
• Staging Environment
• Custom Varnish Rules

Industry-Leading Cloud Partners

Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform, partnered with industry-leading cloud infrastructure providers such as Google, Amazon, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode for better performance and reliability. It allows you to host your WooCommerce store(s) on top-notch cloud providers along with the choice of 60+ data-centers around the globe.

Launch a Cloud Server with Pre-Installed WooCommerce

Getting started with Cloudways is easy. Just head over their Signup page, fill the required details and verify your email address.

Once done, you will get the server launch screen from where you can choose a cloud provider for your WooCommerce store.

Here’s a break-down of each section:

• Application & Server Details

Select “WordPress with WooCommerce” from the first drop-down. Name your store, server, and select a Project.

• Pick a Cloud Provider

Cloudways allows you to choose from five top-notch cloud providers. Later, we’ll describe the parameters while choosing a cloud provider.

• Server Size

The Server size consists of RAM, Processor, Storage, and Bandwidth. Mouse hover on a particular size and it will display what server specs you will get.

• Location

Lastly, choose a data-center location closest to your target customers. Each provider has different data-center locations.

Once you are done choosing the required server specifications, check your pricing from the bottom left and click on the LAUNCH NOW button at the bottom right.

Which Cloud Provider Should You Choose?

Choosing a cloud provider can be tricky sometimes, so we suggest choosing a provider based on the following parameters:

• Offers local-datacenter

Cloudways is partnered with five cloud providers offering 60+ data-centers globally. Head over to the Cloudways pricing page and look for Data-centers as highlighted below:

Always go with the one that offers the data-center nearest to your targeted audience. This helps in reducing latency and to experience the fastest loading times.

• Uptime

Let’s say DigitalOcean and Vultr both offer the data-centers you are looking for. There is a tie between the two. Now the deciding factor should be the uptime each data-center offers.

There is an excellent website “Cloudharmony” which monitors uptime for a number of infrastructure providers.

• Budget

Lastly, if the data-center and uptime of a particular cloud provider remain the same. You can choose the one that best fits your budget.

Your server will be ready in just a few minutes with WooCommerce pre-installed. Here is how your server will look like:

You can see the server specs including the server name, size, IP address, and the data-center along with the number of websites installed on this server where it says “www” on the right side.

Get into the server and you will land on the server management screen.

Server Management

Here is what each section refers to:

• Master Credentials: It contains the Server IP, SSH access credentials for your server.
• Monitoring: Monitor the health of your server.
• Manage Services: Restart/Stop core services such as NGINX, Apache, Memcached, Database, New Relic, PHP-FPM, and Varnish.
• Setting & Packages: Choose PHP version, database version, Enable Elasticsearch, etc.
• Security: Whitelist IP/ IP subnets for SSH/SFTP and database access.
• Vertical Scaling: Scale your servers anytime when needed.
• Backups: Adjust backup frequency, retention, local backups, on-demand backup, and most importantly, restore.
• SMTP: Configure an SMTP mail server.

Managing Websites Made Easier

On the Cloudways Platform, most of the operations, from installing an SSL certificate to cloning and creating a staging environment are just a click away. From the top-left menu, navigate to the Applications tab and you will get a list of Applications installed on each server.

Get into an application and you will see a screen like below.

Here is what each section refers to:

• Access Details: Default credentials for your store, Database, and SFTP access.
• Staging Management: Create the Staging of an application from the bottom right, and you will see this tab to push/pull changes.
• Monitoring: Monitor the application-level metrics that include PHP, disk space, etc.
• Domain Management: Point and manage your domains.
• Cron Job Management: Add and manage cron jobs from here.
• SSL Certificate: Either create a free SSL certificate via Let’s Encrypt or use the one you already have.
• Backup and Restore: Take application backups or restore them.
• Deployment Via Git: Connect your application to Git using this tab.
• Application Setting: Configure all application settings such as Varnish include/exclude URLs & cookies, SSH access, application access, etc.
• Migrating Tools: Cloudways offers the WordPress Migrator plugin that migrates your store from any host to the Cloudways Platform.
• CloudwaysCDN: Enable CloudwaysCDN for your store.

We have been using and recommending Cloudways for a long time just because they offer a highly-optimized stack, security, and the best-in-class cloud infrastructure providers. Not only this, but they are the best bet for a scalable and flexible WooCommerce hosting solution for small to large store owners.

Are you already using Cloudways? If yes, how has your experience been so far? If not, give them a try by leveraging their 3-day FREE trial (without credit card) and share your experience.

Bonus Tip: Signup on Cloudways one of the best WooCommerce hosting platform and get the 30% OFF for the first three months (CODE: WOO30)