I’m Andre Gagnon – a designer, developer, and digital entrepreneur. I’ve built a successful web business, theme shop, and I’m currently the full-time founder of ProjectHuddle, a WordPress plugin for dead-simple client feedback.
Selling themes and plugins for over a decade has given me a unique experience with hosting because you end up helping thousands of customers on hundreds of different WordPress servers. It’s a safe bet to say that I’ve worked with more hosts than the average person in our industry!
ProjectHuddle, A WordPress plugin for client feedback and approval.
Saying Goodbye to Trade-Offs With Cloudways
Up until Cloudways, I’ve made difficult trade-offs when choosing a web host. You can either choose a fully-managed solution, which often meant giving up a lot of control and flexibility, or you could go directly through cloud providers, like DigitalOcean, which involves configuring everything yourself. That’s way too much technical debt for an average freelancer or agency.
This is why I was simply blown away when I first came across Cloudways.
It’s everything I wanted in a host – the speed and ease of traditional managed hosting paired with the flexibility that you don’t typically find on managed hosting. Hands-down, there’s no other hosting provider that has the speed, ease, and flexibility that Cloudways offers.
ProjectHuddle and Cloudways Are a Perfect Match
We find that our customers on Cloudways have far fewer support needs because Cloudways has everything you need to run ProjectHuddle and WordPress successfully. Here are some of our must-haves for running ProjectHuddle, and Cloudways ticks all the boxes:
- Performance
Things always load lightning-fast on Cloudways servers – even without any tweaks. Plus, there’s never any lag or slowness when adding comments, approving pages, or resolving issues. All this happens instantly thanks to their fine-tuned WordPress hosting stack.
- Email Delivery
ProjectHuddle uses email and email digests to keep everyone in the loop about a project. Many hosts don’t have any type of integrated email delivery, so you’re left to figure this out on your own. Cloudways, on the other hand, has awesome built-in Elastic email SMTP services for email delivery, including a free Gmail option.
- Ability To Create a Dedicated Install for your ProjectHuddle Dashboard
We always recommend using a dedicated WordPress installation for ProjectHuddle for many reasons. ProjectHuddle makes it dead-simple to spin up a new app, so you can create a dedicated central dashboard to manage all of your client projects with ease. This means you can manage the status of all your projects from a single place without bloating your clients’ sites with unnecessary files and data.
- Flexible Scaling
ProjectHuddle does not take a lot of resources to run – it’s a feedback tool that typically only a handful of users have access to. So the ability to choose a smaller resource server for ProjectHuddle makes a lot of sense. You’re not paying for extra horsepower which you’ll never use, and should you ever want to add additional sites or apps to your server, you can scale up at any time!
- 1-Click SSL
SSL is now a requirement for all websites, and, of course, for ProjectHuddle, too. In fact, Chrome even marks sites as “Not Secure” if they aren’t loaded over https. A 1-click SSL option is dead-simple and provides the security needed for ProjectHuddle and your client’s sites.
- Cron Job Management
ProjectHuddle often makes use of scheduled emails for sending weekly and daily reports to users. Having self-configurable, built-in cron management makes it a breeze to ensure emails are sent on time.
ProjectHuddle Scheduled Email Options
Why I Recommend Cloudways to Our Customers and Their Clients
There are increasingly more hosting choices out there than ever before. It comes as no surprise that I always give a glowing recommendation to Cloudways. Here are my reasons why:
- Flexibility: You can host a number of apps on a single server, which is great for kickstarting development. When you’re ready to go live, you can easily clone the site to a different server in a few clicks.
- Options: Cloudways has optimized stacks for when your clients need microservices or other types of apps like Laravel, Magento, or WooCommerce. You don’t need to configure anything – they’ve optimized the server specifically for these types of needs.
- Pay As You Go: You’re not locked in a long-term contract with your hosting company. If you need to remove a client from your hosting plan, you’re not on the hook for anything.
- Staging: Built-in WordPress staging environment makes things super easy to run your website care plans. You can easily clone staging, make all the updates and tests you need, and push to live in a few clicks.
- Backups: Integrated backups (with duplicate local backups) means you never have to worry about losing data on your client’s sites.
- App Cloning: You can use a built-in website cloning feature to quickly spin up starter sites for new projects, saving you a ton of time getting sites configured for the first time. In fact, it makes it easy to get going with ProjectHuddle too.
[Caption: The Admin Bar showing off Cloudways’ cloning feature with ProjectHuddle for a quick project kickoff.]
While you can get most of these features with other managed hosting providers, that typically means giving up control over your stack. With Cloudways you can configure your own caching rules, configure CORS options, ensure email delivery, set Cron Jobs, use PHP Sessions, access via SSH – the list goes on!
If you’re done with trade-offs like me (and want it all!), look no further than Cloudways. They simply have everything. It’s a complete hosting solution and you can’t go wrong with them.
Mustaasam Saleem
Mustaasam is the WordPress Community Manager at Cloudways. Where he actively works and loves sharing his knowledge with the WordPress Community. When he is not working, you can find him playing squash with his friends, or defending in Football, and listening to music.