Every blogger’s nightmare is those monthly hosting costs which can be a burden if the blog hasn’t started generating income.

And looking into Cloudways‘ pricing can leave a somewhat sour taste in preference. So, in the end, is Cloudways worth it?

A recent evaluation of this blog revealed some things that I was rather attempting to avoid.

Amongst those revelations, the blog’s performance was one of the highest risks highlighted. Now we all know how daunting it can be to look into your work and realize that you need to improve.

Improvements do not come without a cost but also come with improved results. In the process of scaling this blog, I realized how important it was to focus on creating the best possible experience for the reader.

Improving the reader’s experience is something that is currently ongoing. I have to admit, this is not something I have been enjoying doing.

Every now and then I scream at the amount of work this improvement has been demanding.

Reaching a point where you start scaling up your business, is because you have noticed some growth or sensed a need for improvement.

This can only happen if you get started. And this is where Cloudways comes in, thanks to their Free Google Page Experience Checker.

I performed a test for this blog, and the results were so poor that I spent an entire week  venting to whoever cared to listen.

As a beginner in blogging, certain things don’t matter. I was just excited to be blogging and with zero clue about SEO, Page performance, and Best practices.

But the Free Google Page Experience Checker didn’t waste time in showing me all the horrible practices I had been doing over here.

Here are some things that I did to evaluate this blog’s performance.

  • Blog’s Performance

Evaluating the blog’s performance was important as this determined how the users were experiencing using this blog. And it wasn’t a good look. At this moment, the current score is 84% per the test which is still a long journey ahead to reach the desired results.

This has left me wondering if I should consider migrating the blog to Cloudways and if it is worth it.

By looking at cloudways ‘ promotional message which is promising to supercharge my blog with managed hosting trusted by 75,000+ businesses that demand high performance and reliability for their online presence, this speaks to the current state of my blog .

Benefitts of considering Cloudways

  • Performance Without Bounds

A fully optimized stack with built-in advanced cache and Cloudflare (CDN), ensures peak website performance, resulting in faster growth and less frustration.

  • Cloudflare Enterprise CDN

Activating Cloudflare Enterprise dramatically improves performance, compared to a traditional CDN. The tiered cache delivers your content faster globally via a reserved-for-enterprises network, and reduces latency, loading time and bandwidth costs.

  • SSD-Based Hosting

SSD drives are 3x faster, facilitating breathtaking performance and reduced page load times for your dynamic websites.

  • Built-in Advanced Caches

We provide an optimized stack with ready to use caches including Memcached, Varnish, Nginx, and Redis to deliver expedited responses.

  • PHP 7 Ready Servers

All our server are PHP 7.3 ready. PHP 7 is known to be significantly faster than its predecessor.

  • Dedicated Environment

All servers launched on Cloudways have dedicated resources. Contrary to the limitations of shared hosting, our dedicated environment allows you to maximize server and app performance.

  • Auto-Healing Managed Cloud Servers

You don’t have to worry about your website crashing. Most of the issues within the server are resolved with auto-healing restarts.

  • Free WordPress Cache Plugin

Breeze is engineered in-house to offer better WordPress performance than any other plugin in the industry. With simplicity at zero cost, Breeze comes pre-installed on Cloudways.

  • Redis Support

Enabling Redis improves the performance of databases. Combined with Apache, Nginx, and Varnish get you unbeatable performance.

  • Free Magento Full Page Cache

Built-in Full Page Cache gives you one of the fastest hosting stacks. It significantly improves the performance of Magento 1.x stores.

  • Pre-configured PHP-FPM

PHP-FPM dramatically speeds up your website and improves the loading times of your PHP environment with much faster processes.

  • HTTP/2 Supported Servers

Cloudways servers are HTTP/2 enabled which significantly increases the speed of communication between the web servers and clients.

  • Image and Mobile Optimization

Activating the Cloudflare Enterprise add-on brings one-click simple image optimization with Polish and mobile optimization with Mirage, instantly improving user experience and loading time on all types of screens.I found myself manually reducing images which is still an incomplete process ,this is one of the reasons I think Cloudways is worth it.

  • HTTP/3 Support with Cloudflare

HTTP/3 is the next evolution of the HTTP protocol. Activating Cloudflare Enterprise add-on on top of your Cloudways hosting will have you ready when browser support for HTTP/3 broadens.

  • Flexibility That Adapts

Choice of 5 cloud providers (DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, etc.) to unlimited websites (WordPress, PHP, etc.) on any plan gives you freedom and control over your vision.

  • Simplicity That Saves Time

Staging environment, managing backups, vertical scaling, or installing free SSL; every operation is a few clicks away, allowing you to get more work done in less time.

 

 

 

The below screenshot shows the current results as the improvement is still ongoing.

 

Looking at the benefits that come with all the plans from Cloudways, with the 84% performance, perhaps it might be worth it to migrate the blog to a performance-based hosting service provider.

 

Server Name RAM Processor Storage Bandwidth Monthly Price
DO1GB 1 GB 1 Core 25GB 1TB $12/mon
DO2GB 2 GB 1 Core 50GB 2TB $26/mon
DO4GBPOPULAR 4 GB 2 Core 80GB 4TB $50/mon
DO8GB 8 GB 4 Core 160GB 5TB $96/mon
DO16GB 16 GB 8 Core 320GB 6TB $160/mon

All Plans Come With
  • 24/7/365 Support
  • Free SSL
  • Cloudflare Add-on NEW
  • Free Migration
  • Unlimited Application Installation
  • Dedicated Firewalls
  • 24/7 Real-time Monitoring
  • Automated Backups
  • Staging Environment
  • Optimized With Advanced Caches
  • Auto Healing
  • Regular Security Patching
  • Free Object Cache Pro (2GB & above)
  • HTTP/2 Enabled Servers
  • SSH and SFTP Access
  • Team Management

  • SEO

SEO is one key factor in blogging. While writing might be fun, you want to optimize your posts so they can be discovered on search engines such as Google.

After all, blogging is about sharing information. My previous score before the tests on SEO was a very nice 0.00.

Shocking I know, I had to rely on tools like Yoast to better improve the SEO on the blog. The reason the score is at 92%, is that there are still outstanding blog posts that require some improvement.

  • Image sizing

Google Analytics was always sending emails reminding me about how it was painful to load large content. Thanks to technology, I found tools like the WordPress smush plugin to resize the images for the blog to load faster.

In the end, I would say that for improved performance, one would definitely consider Cloudways worth it.

But of course, for a beginner, it would make no business sense to jump on expensive hosting plans.

For a blog that is considering scaling up its revenue, I’d say it is definitely worth it.

The best part about migrating your blog to cloudways is that you have dedicated 24/7 support. Migrating a WordPress blog is covered in the plan for free.

While I am all for freebies at times, for this blog I will hire someone on Fiverr just to be on the safe side.

Enjoyed reading this post ? Read more about how I make $5000 blogging every month . You can also check out how much you can earn testing wesbistes here .