With the emergence of Cloud technology, the web world has seen great transformation in terms of tech upgrades and workflow automation. Using cloud, businesses feel freedom to streamline their web operations more effortlessly. The infrastructure allows businesses to focus more on the core functions, rather than bothering about any of the manual server management hassles.
Today, many services claim to be the best-in-class cloud solutions, but only a handful of them rightly deserves that tag. This makes the end-users choice a bit complicated, as sometimes they are left with vague cloud names, which have no ground in cloud infrastructure and tech expertise.
Cloudways is one of those few companies, which has proven experience in providing quality and advanced cloud hosting services. The company is regarded as one of the best PHP hosting solutions in the market, as it provides an optimized stack and latest web technologies to enhance business operations.
Let’s explore the Cloudways platform in detail, and see what makes it one of the best to host PHP applications on:
About Cloudways PaaS
Cloudways facilitates developers to manage web applications with advanced cloud hosting services. The platform provides a fully managed cloud hosting solution that takes away all your server management hassles and manual configuration tasks. It is a perfect platform for SMBs, ecommerce store owners, digital agencies and other business units to deploy web applications on.
Cloudways is associated with some of the renowned cloud providers in the industry, including DigitalOcean, Google Cloud Engine (GCE), Linode and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Using Cloudways, you can deploy applications on some of the best hosting platforms in the world, without bothering about any manual server configuration or migration problems.
The platform has more than 50+ data centers globally, thereby covering almost every part of the world with the best-of-the-class hosting services. This allows users to get concurrent access to resources and optimum web speed all the time, no matter where they belong to. In short, it is a complete managed platform where you can easily build, deploy and scale applications with absolutely zero-downtime problems.
Thunderstack
Being a developer-friendly platform, Cloudways provides a specific stack of tools called Thunderstack to manage applications with ease. The stack includes some of the known web optimization tools including, Varnish, Memcached, PHP-FPM, Redis and others. Using these tools, developers can optimize the performance of their applications and can enhance their speed on the web.
The stack comes pre-configured on the server once a user launches an application on Cloudways. This reduces their technical load to configure these tools manually, which often takes a lot of time. Hence, there is no manual installation required, and users can start working with these tools as per the requirements of the application(s).
Top PHP Frameworks & CMS Solutions
With Cloudways, you can work with your favorite PHP frameworks and versions. Whether your project needs Laravel or requires Symfony, you can easily install and start working with your favorite framework within minutes. All of the top PHP frameworks including Laravel, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Symfony, Zend, and others are available on Cloudways and can be easily installed using the platform’s built-in Composer.
Similarly, the platform also supports all the major CMS solutions including WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Opencart and others. You can easily install any of these CMS solutions within minutes and can start building your online store or a commercial website without any technical assistance.
Staging Environment
To find out possible errors and bugs in an application, Cloudways provides a staging feature that allows developers to test applications on a testing environment before taking them live. It is a great feature that helps developers to resolve errors before they go live, and disrupt the website’s online performance. Using it proactively, developers can perform QA operations precisely and can get error-free performance on the web.
The platform provides a separate staging domain, where developers can deploy and test applications with complete freedom. The testing domain provides similar performance as it is on the live web, giving developers an accurate view of how the application will look like once it goes live on the server.
GitHub Deployment
GitHub has become a prominent platform for developers to upload/store projects and codes. It has an ever-growing community which contributes regularly to the platform, uploading various codes and libraries to their repositories.
Cloudways provides a unique feature that allows developers to easily deploy projects and codes from GitHub. Using this feature, developers can effortlessly move their desired projects to the platform in just a few clicks. The platform also offers a pre-built Composer that allows developers to install external libraries from any source, helping them integrate added functionalities in a matter of minutes.
Remote MySQL & IP Whitelisting
Cloudways allows remote teams to collaborate effectively by accessing remote databases quickly. It is a unique feature that helps teams to connect remote MySQL databases from distant places and perform required operations in a few steps.
To access databases, developers must first whitelist the desired IP addresses which they want to give access. The platform provides an IP Whitelisting section, where developers can define intended IP addresses and their access configuration. It’s a quite fast process, as all the instructions are already defined in the user-friendly UI panel to make the developer’s job easier.
Final Words
Cloudways is one of those platforms that not only provide an advanced cloud hosting solution but also provides great affordable pricing for its valued global customers. It is a one-stop-shop that provides top-class managed hosting features including the staging environment, elasticsearch in PHP apps, easy framework & CMS installation, effortless remote MySQL connection and more. In short, it’s a complete platform where you can build, deploy and manage applications with fun.
If you still want to know more about Cloudways or have some questions regarding it, please feel free to write them in the comments section below.
