What a year it has been! The team at Cloudways promised to embark upon achieving a heap of milestones in 2016.
And…
We never looked back.
As a part of an excellent team, I think this year has been one of the most promising years for us.
We set benchmarks. We achieved accolades. We grew exponentially.
How?
Because we had the support of some of the most awesome customers, community superstars, and supporters, who helped us continually improve and push ourselves beyond our comfort zone.
Moreover, for that, we have only two words for all of you: THANK YOU
Here’s what we added in our arsenal during the year that went.
February
Being a slow month, the engineers at Cloudways decided to update the iteration of Debian.
Debian 8
Debian 8 “Jessie,” the 8th iteration of the operating system, is considered to be a giant leap forward because of its varied features. Debian 8 was integrated right at the beginning of the year, setting off the chain of improvements to follow.
March
PHP7
After rigorously testing PHP 7 for stability and functional optimization on the Platform, the engineers at Cloudways decided to go ahead with the integration of 1-click install of PHP 7.
Drupal 8
Drupal 6 was killed off. Drupal 7.x will soon be killed off. This paved the way for the new and stable version of Drupal, Drupal 8. Integrated as a 1-click install, Drupal 8 comes with the support for PHP 7.
Nginx SSL with Varnish Support
The input of our users is crucial for our progress. Moreover, we make sure we fulfill their requests.
Magento 2
Testing. Feasibility study and stability checks. The engineers at Cloudways conducted a complete QA before integrating the newest version of the popular ecommerce application, Magento.
April
April went by in preparing for the coming hectic month of May, which was packed with improvements. But, we made sure we give our users a peek of what was to come.
Let’s Encrypt
Cloudways have been a proponent of open source services. Keeping up with this, we struck a partnership to provide our users a safe online experience by integrating FREE SSL, Let’s Encrypt on 1-click.
May
The month of May was a significant step forward for Cloudways. Here is what went down:
Project Feature
A feature integrated within the Platform that allows teams, agencies, and developers to manage their projects with ease. You can make separate folders for every project or put all your projects in one folder. Ease is with you.
Cloudways Platform 2.0 Beta
More robust, speedier, and more user-friendly, the Cloudways Platform was revamped and designed based on the material guidelines. We went live with the Beta of Cloudways Platform. Have a look.
New Website for Cloudways
With the revamp of the Platform, the Cloudways website needed a new look as well. All landing pages were restructured and made according to the optimal design guidelines.
New Blog for Cloudways
Website redesigned. Platform redesigned. Why leave the Cloudways Blog unattended? The next up in line to receive a makeover was the Cloudways Blog. The blog is now more reader friendly and is updated on a regular basis.
June
We welcomed Summer by stepping foot in the sub-continent and taking the first steps towards improving the already launched Cloudways Platform.
DigitalOcean’s Indian Datacenter
During the hot and wet months of summers, Cloudways stepped its foot in the Sub-Continent region with the integration of the DigitalOcean’s Bangalore Datacenter.
Launched Affiliate Program
Affiliate marketing is one of the most prominent forms of making money online. How do we help? Not only do we provide one of the best Managed Hosting Platform, but we also offer one of the leading payouts (minimum $25 commission on every conversion) in the industry with our customer centric Affiliate Program.
Real time billing
We work on the Pay As You Go method. So it was only fitting to integrate a real-time billing mechanism to help our users keep track of their server expenditure.
August
Fresh off the summer heat, the team at Cloudways got all geared to launch the first of its kind Managed Cloud Hosting chat bot, CloudwaysBot.
PHP-FPM
What if I told you, on Cloudways, you could cut your web application loading times by 300%? With PHP-FPM integrated, our tests results came out exceptionally speeditastic.
CloudwaysBot
AI is the future of technology. Cloudways took its first step into the field of AI by introducing the first of its kind chatbot that provides real-time insights and updates on preferred channels of users, CloudwaysBot.
Cloudways 2.0 (Live)
After being in the Beta testing phase for more than two months, the team decided that the Platform is stable enough to be taken live and made default. This was the time when we parted ways with the old Cloudways console. A new exciting era just began.
HTTP/2
Speed and safe browsing, the two most important factors for web-applications. With the aim of fulfilling this need of our users, the engineers made another addition to the Cloudways ThunderStack, HTTP/2.
September
Container hosting is the future of the hosting industry, and it was only imminent that Cloudways integrated a container hosting infrastructure within its Platform.
Launched Kyup Container Hosting
Container hosting is not a new phenomenon, but it is certainly picking up much pace. Owing to the rise in popularity, and the demand for auto-scalability, Cloudways integrated Managed Kyup Cloud infrastructure in the Platform, the fifth addition in our Cloud infrastructures.
October
Making the Platform more friendly for the developers, cloud engineers went ahead and released the Public API of Cloudways.
Introduced Cloudways API
API is the breeding ground for developers. Making the Platform friendlier for developers, SaaS agencies, designers, and design agencies, Cloudways took its API live for the public. Users can automate and integrate their server functions using the Cloudways API.
SaaS Hosting – A Perfect Solution for Your SaaS Application
November
The holiday season was fast approaching, so we had to make sure that our customers, specially the ecommerce stores on our website, get the best out of the Cloudways Platform.
Improved Varnish Controls & UI
Helping users speed up their ecommerce stores, content-rich website, or even, design big internet sites, Cloudways integrated the option to include or exclude cookies and exclude URL’s, that you do not want Varnish to cache, in 1-click.
Announced GCE Oregon & Vultr Singapore Data Center
To make Cloudways footprints stronger in the Asian and American region, we integrated the Oregon Datacenter for GCE and the Singapore Datacenter for Vultr. Our users can now host near to their audience on their preferred cloud infrastructure.
Love From The Community
During 2016, we received some mentions from the media, including reviews. Relive some of the press mentions and the reviews, one more time.
Media Mentions
Although, we created a lot of buzz in the media during the past year, here are some of the bigger ones:
- PCMag reviewed Cloudways, and a lot of excitement came with the review.
- Ben Kepes talked about our integration of the Managed Container Hosting via the Kyup Cloud Infrastructure at Network World.
- We had our first article posted on The Next Web
Reviews
One of the ways for us to improve is to focus on the rating we receive from the community. We had reviews all year round from some publishers and blogs, here are some of them to refresh the memories.
Thank You For Making 2016 Great For Us
The year that went by was only the beginning of the innovative disruption that we, at Cloudways, are working to provide. The right way forward for us, as a company, is to work on the feedback from our users.
Yes, we want to improve and provide you the best services in the Managed Cloud Hosting industry. Help us in making 2017 great for you by providing us your feedback about our services.
HAVE A VERY SAFE AND PROSPEROUS
NEW YEAR
FROM THE WHOLE TEAM
OF
CLOUDWAYS
Shahzeb Ahmed
Shahzeb is a Digital Marketer with a Software Engineering background, works as a Community Manager — PHP Community at Cloudways. He is growth ambitious and aims to learn & share information about PHP & Laravel Development through practice and experimentation. He loves to travel and explore new ideas whenever he finds time. Get in touch with him at [email protected]
