Here’s Why fairly marvellous CIC Relies on Cloudways to Manage Its MemberPress Sites

Jonathan: We have saved money on our bigger, complex sites. But the overall increase in productivity has encouraged us to move even our smallest sites over to Cloudways. On the one hand, this costs more than the shared hosting we were using. On the other hand, the improvement in performance and reliability has saved us time, which means money saved in the long run.

Cloudways: What do you advise the people willing to host their MemberPress sites with Cloudways?

Jonathan: Take out the free trial to get the hang of the service and try out a migration.

If your membership site is a new idea then the simple scalability means you can try out your idea before spending too much money. With small businesses and charities, it’s important to try walking before running.

Cloudways: What are some features that you think allowed you to manage MemberPress on Cloudways?

Jonathan: Being able to clone sites quickly makes it much easier to try out new ideas, test features, and demonstrate it all to our clients. We’re really excited about the new free Object Cache Pro offering as this will help with uncached performance, which is important for membership sites.

We can easily keep an eye on our CPU and RAM utilization and not have to worry about the hidden limitations, like limiting PHP workers or inodes, that other hosts impose. We can take the decision to upgrade when we’re ready, or optimize costs by sharing a more powerful server between one large application and other smaller ones.

Cloudways: What cloud providers did you choose? What do you think of the flexibility of choosing a cloud provider at Cloudways?

Jonathan: We currently have a mix of DigitalOcean and Vultr. The ability to just fire up a server within minutes and only pay for the days it is live is brilliant, so we can compare an app’s performance on, for example, Google Cloud easily.

Cloudways: How do you find our staging environment and cloning feature?

Jonathan: Cloning is invaluable, the ability to fire up a dev copy of a site in minutes is great when working with clients. We now do all our development on a Cloudways server equivalent to our live environment rather than locally, which makes it so much easier to work as a team and to demonstrate.

We maintain an app running our default WordPress/Astra/BeaverBuilder stack, preconfigured with all the options and plugins we use for most of our sites, which we can keep up-to-date. It then takes moments to clone that stack and start building a site for a new client.

Cloudways: How would you rate our customer support experience?

Jonathan: On the rare occasions, I’ve had issues or queries, the live chat has been great. I also know our account manager is always keeping an eye on how things are going!

As members of the Agency Program, the advanced support we receive is reassuring.

Cloudways: What overall impact did Cloudways have on your business? Before and after? Speed, performance, multiple site management?

Jonathan: Cloudways has made it much easier for us to scale our business and manage so many servers and applications. With a good broadband connection, developing on a Cloudways server can be faster than using a local development tool.

We’re not restricted to the backup, optimization, or management tools that we can use, so we can pick the best tools for the job. Some hosts won’t let you use whatever you want, because it conflicts with the way they stretch their environments.

Cloudways: Was there anything surprising about moving to Cloudways?

Jonathan: We’ve saved time and money – two very important resources for a non-profit!

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