Hello, and welcome to my latest article. I have had a lot of experience with some different web hosting companies since starting my two blogs and wanted to pass on some of the things I have learned. If you are thinking about starting your own WordPress blog then you have come to the right place. A good fast web host is one of the most important things for success with your new blogging adventure. So what is the best web hosting for WordPress?
Cloudways is the best web hosting for WordPress in my experience. Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform. This basically means that they have 5 cloud providers (servers) located all over the world. You can select your server location which speeds up your site because the information is served up closer to your visitors. This is similar to a CDN or content delivery network.
Why is Cloudways the best web hosting for WordPress?
There are a lot of different reasons why I believe Cloudways is the best web hosting for WordPress. I will break down each one to hopefully explain why it is the best choice for your blog hosting.
Since I started using their hosting, it has been solid as a rock with no hiccups or problems. I haven’t noticed any down time and the customer service has been awesome!
1. Speed
Cloudways is superfast! Its fastest page loading times are close to 400-600 milliseconds and it has a 99.99% uptime which means that your site will rarely see any downtime if any at all.
What makes it so fast?
- 5 dedicated PHP 7.3 servers for optimum performance
- SSD drives that are 3x faster and lower page load times
- Built-in caches and Free Magento page cache
- CloudwaysCDN for improved response times
- Free Breeze WordPress cache plugin
It utilizes a managed cloud hosting platform which is faster than dedicated, shared or vps hosting. It is also growing in popularity because of its speed and reliability. Here is the proof according to Google trends.
Cloudways vs Siteground
There is a lot of debate between Cloudways and Siteground being the best web host. They are both considered the top two but more and more people are switching from Siteground to Cloudways because of the difference in speed and reliability.
Tom from OnlineMediaMasters.com wrote an entire article on why he switched from Siteground to Cloudways. He ended up cutting his page load times in half and saved $100.00 a month after switching.
Price and speed are probably the two greatest factors when it comes to decision making time for most prospective bloggers. I originally started out with GoDaddy’s managed WordPress hosting before switching to Cloudways.
This is back when I wasn’t as concerned with speed and didn’t know as much about blogging. I have since learned about the importance of speed on your blog and its impact on your readers.
So why is speed so important for your blog?
Retention! This is the most important reason to use fast web hosting on your WordPress blog. Unfortunately in this day and age of modern technology, people aren’t as patient as they used to be.
Humans want things fast and when they visit a website, they want to see it fast. This means your website’s load time is critical to making your readers happy and wanting to stay.
Here are some helpful facts regarding the speed of your WordPress blog:
- Research shows that you have approximately 7 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention before they leave.
- Almost 70% of consumers say that web page loading time affects their potential online purchases.
- The chance of someone leaving your blog goes up 32% when load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds.
- The bounce rate goes up to 123% when the load time of your page increases from 1 to 10 seconds.
- The best conversion rates occur when a page loads between 0-2 seconds.
According to Google, it takes 15.3 seconds for the average website to load on mobile. This is good for you! Use this statistic to your advantage. Shoot for a page load time of under 2 seconds.
You can use GTmetrix to test your page load time. Remember to check your page load time for desktop and mobile. Desktop is normally faster and could mislead you.
2. Reliability
Honestly I haven’t ever really had any issues with downtime since becoming a web hosting customer. Most major web hosting companies at this point have the reliability close to 99% with GoDaddy being the exception at around 94%. There may be some exception with smaller companies.
Cloudways is close to the top with a 99.99% uptime. This makes it easy to focus on the important aspects of running a blog without having to worry about your site disappearing from the internet out of the blue.
PCmag.com tested Cloudways uptime for a thirty day period using a tool that pings their website. Cloudways was extremely stable in the test and didn’t go down once.
3. Scalability
Another reason that Cloudways is the best web hosting for WordPress is because of the scalability. You can start off small with less resources and then eventually scale up when the time comes and you are getting more traffic.
You can think of their scaling in the terms of a body builder adding more and more muscle over time. They give you the flexibility and freedom to add on specific resources at any time.
Vertical scaling includes increasing the CPU, Memory and Storage to your server. All of these things will become more and more important as your site grows and flourishes.
This is great because you are only paying for the resources that you are using. This will save you money in the beginning but give you the flexibility to scale-up later on.
4. Pay As You Go
One of my favorite aspects of Cloudways is their pay as you go model. This means you will only pay for the amount of bandwidth that you use each and every month.
There are no contracts which means you aren’t locked in for any particular length of time. This is perfect for beginners because in the beginning stages of your WordPress blog, you aren’t going to need a lot of bandwidth because a new blog won’t be getting much traffic for at least six months.
Their cheapest standard monthly plan is $10 a month and includes:
- 1GB of RAM
- 1 Core Processor
- 25GB of Storage
- 1TB of Bandwidth
Some of my favorite features:
- Excellent support 24 hours a day and 365 days of the year
- Free CDN (Content Delivery Network) that you can add on
- Free migration of your existing websites if you have any
- Unlimited applications on your server (websites or WordPress blogs)
- Dedicated firewalls with great security
- Automatic backups
- Free cache plugin for WordPress
- Automatic healing if you website takes damage
- Security patching on a regular basis
- Access to SSH and SFTP
I currently have two WordPress blogs running on Cloudways and my last invoice was $22.50 for both of my websites.
5. Instant Support 24/7
They definitely have some of the best support that I have ever experienced. I had some questions about migration when I first signed up and contacted them through their live chat which is 24/7.
I was immediately helped by M. Asif who answered all of my questions and made my website migration for both of my blogs quick and easy.
He followed up with me via email to make sure that things were going well and to help me promote their affiliate program which I will get to later on in this article.
Cloudways has a team of experts to help you problem solve any issues you may be having. They are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days of the year!
They also have the usual online ticketing system for more complex issues. If you need phone support, they offer an add-on for premium support with a senior support engineer for advanced problems typically affecting larger websites.
6. Easy Migration
Cloudways makes it very easy to migrate any existing websites that you may have on another web hosting platform. It was a breeze migrating my two blogs, RedFoxBlog.com and ShepherdsBone.com over to their servers.
They have three options for migrating your existing websites:
- 1 Free Migration: Every new Cloudways customer receives one free website migration. This is the easiest and quickest way to migrate your blog or website. Their team of experts does everything for you!
- Free Cloudways WordPress Migrator Plugin: If you have more than one site like I did, you can use their very simple to use migrator plugin to transfer any existing WordPress blogs.
- Managed Application Migration to Cloudways: If you need help with more than one migration, their experts can help you migrate any WordPress blog for $25.00.
They have a complete article explaining how to use the Cloudways WordPress Migrator Plugin.
7. Unlimited Applications
One of the coolest features about Cloudways Managed Cloud Hosting is that you can have an unlimited number of applications on your server.
This means that you can multiple websites on one server. I currently have RedFoxBlog.com and ShepherdsBone.com on my single server (DigitalOcean). They are both running WordPress but you can also install multiple different applications.
Applications you can install include:
- Drupal
- Joomla
- Laravel
- Magento
- OpenCart
- PrestaShop
- WordPress (with or without WooCommerce)
Because you can have multiple applications on your server, you will never have to purchase another server.
8. Affiliate Program
Join their affiliate program and choose your own payment structure. Cloudways is the only web hosting affiliate that will let you choose which type of commission model you want to use.
Performance-based Slabs:
With the performance-based slabs you can earn up to $125 per sale depending on the amount of sign-ups you send. Commissions start at $50 per sale for 1-5 customer and increase all the way up to $125 per sale for 46-80 customer sign-ups.
Super affiliates that send more than 80 sign-ups can contact Cloudways for a custom dollar amount per sale.
Hybrid Model:
The hybrid model lets you earn $30 per sale and then 7% commissions for the lifetime of the customer. You can check out there hybrid monthly earnings calculator to get an estimate of what you can earn. For Example, you can earn $4,801 in 12 months by signing up just 10 recurring customers.
This is a great way to build a passive income that will keep paying over the lifetime of the customer.
Cloudways provides a dedicated affiliate manager to help you send traffic and build sales. They are there to answer any questions along the way.
They also send out benchmark articles, blogs, guides, monthly newsletters and onboarding emails to help you get setup.
Cookies last for 90 days and you can access your detailed stats right from your affiliate panel.
9. Free 3 Day Trial
They give you the opportunity to try out Cloudways 3 days for free without any risks or obligation. They don’t require you to use a credit card and you can cancel the trial at any time.
I signed up for the free trial when I joined to see what it was like and was obviously very satisfied. They let you go ahead and setup your first server and you can get familiar with the workspace.
Just make sure that you choose the correct location for your server based on whichever location is closest to your target audience. For me I chose the (DigitalOcean) server located in New York because most of my visitors will be coming from the United States.
Setting up my two blogs was very easy thanks to the Cloudways WordPress Migrator Plugin I discussed earlier in the article.
Like I said, if you need any help along the way, they won’t hesitate to help you and are very friendly!
In Closing:
I hope this article gave you enough information to conclude, what is the best web hosting for WordPress. Cloudways is by far my favorite web host that I have ever had and their speed and customer support is second to none.
Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think!
What web hosting do you use? If you end up becoming a Cloudways customer, let me know what you think! I would love to hear about your experience with the web host!