We’re always looking at the core technologies we use every day to deliver our service to clients. And there isn’t any technology as fundamental to our service as hosting. In recent years this is an area which has seen a lot of new options with the advent of cloud hosting. But whenever we evaluated these options compared to the traditional options we’d been using, they came with too many trade-offs.
The new Cloud hosting service we’re using has managed to mitigate all the trade-offs while still providing us with the key benefits. Cloudways are effectively a management service. Through them we can set up servers with 5 Cloud Hosting providers across more than 25 global locations. But it’s all managed through their custom interface/control panel. The part Cloudways are adding/are responsible for is managing the ‘LAMP stack’. So they take care of patching, Operating System updates etc.
This combination gives us the both worlds fit, giving us the flexibility of cloud hosting, but which is more managed and takes away a lot of repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Which leaves us time to focus on developing the website, and liaising with clients.
With Cloudways we can have a new server set-up in 10 minutes, and scale a server up in a similar timeframe.
The benefits to our clients is really clear. Being able to set up a server so quickly means it’s a snap to set up a copy of their site to test changes on before they go live, and equally to test their site against the latest version of PHP. One click installation of some of the most common PHP applications like WordPress is a further time saving.
And that’s before we get to the speed benefits. Cloudways benefits from having an optimized stack that they control which includes a host of caching options. With one site we migrated page loads went from 4.22s to 1.31s.
With Cloudways range of locations, we can host sites as close to their users as possible which is another key way to keep page loads quick.
We’re currently in the initial phase of moving the sites we host for clients to Cloudways. A phase we’re expecting may take several months, but so far we’re very happy with the results.
