Last year, we all experienced some drastic shifts and the gradual acceptance of a new norm. One of the newest and biggest shifts was from brick & mortar to ecommerce stores. As of April 2020, ecommerce year-over-year growth was up 68%, surpassing 40% of total retail sales.
Ultimately, ecommerce becomes the need of every business owner. That’s what drives the demand for ecommerce platforms such as Magento. Magento’s open-source, strong architecture, and its well-known & supportive community are major draws for potential ecommerce store owners.
As the challenges and demands of ecommerce grow, Magento’s flag is hoisted high, which is why they’re able to meet high customer expectations. Just as Magento maintains advanced architecture to help merchants, Cloudways, a managed cloud hosting platform for Magento, is contributing its part to offer optimized servers for an excellent performance.
Cloudways: The Best Hosting Platform for Magento
Cloudways has been running the show for the last decade, satisfying thousands of customers across the globe. Merchants, developers, and agencies can launch Magento applications on top cloud providers, including DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and Google (News - Alert) Cloud Platform with the optimized hosting stack. The easy-to-use dashboard allows non-technical people to manage the server on their own.
How to Launch Magento 2.4.x with Cloudways?
Starting off with Cloudways is a piece of cake! First, you need to create your account with Cloudways.
Your first screen would look like this. Click on Launch Server to deploy your first Magento application with Cloudways.
Select the latest Magento 2.4 application, and name the application and server.
Next, choose the cloud providers. If the question of which cloud provider to pick gives you pause, you can figure it out in this simple way. First, check out which data centers are nearest to your targeted audience. Then take a look at the pricing plan - all the cloud providers have their own pricing plan.
Select the server size that’s required for your Magento application.
Note: Cloudways recommends launching the Magento server with a 4GB hosting plan.
After that, select the server location.
Hit launch now!
Supported Features: Latest Magento 2.4.x Applications
Cloudways fulfills all the server requirements recommended by Magento officials.
Latest PHP Versions
With the Cloudways user interface, you can easily find different PHP versions and switch between the required PHP versions.
Besides, you can also launch an SSH and run the command php -v to verify the latest PHP version on the server.
Operating System
Cloudways offers Debian installation as an OS layer for all the cloud servers.
Web Servers
Cloudways supports two major web server technologies. One is Apache, and the second is NGINX. The configuration of these web servers ensures 100% optimization and server functionality.
Magento also officially recommends both of these web server technologies.
Run this command to check the NGINX installation and version: dpkg -l grep nginx
And run this command to check the Apache installation and version: dpkg -l grep apache
You can also check the status of both web servers via the Cloudways console under the Manage Services section.
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch performs searches at a high rate to help with data discovery or research. It is a perfect fit for the cloud servers based on multiple APIs (restful API or PHP API), support for multi-tenant and much more. With Cloudways, Elasticsearch is the default and pre-configured search engine for Magento applications.
Cache Technologies: Varnish & Redis
Cloudways offers two major cache technologies to speed up the Magento application performance: Varnish to load the Magento application content faster, and Redis to optimize the database and searching processes.
Let’s see how to measure these cache technologies with Cloudways.
PHP OPCache
PHP OPcache is recommended by Magento officials as it capably handles more requests in less time, and makes a bunch of executions quickly.
With Cloudways PHP OPCache is a pre-configured component. Navigate to Settings & Packages > Advanced, from where you can increase the OPCache memory size.
Database: MariaDB
Cloudway offers default MariaDB version 10.4 for Magento applications.
Required System Dependencies
Cloudways supports all the important system dependencies required for a Magento application. These dependencies let you troubleshoot any sort of server hiccups.
All you have to do is connect your SSH, access your Magento application, and type: ls /bin/
Required PHP Extensions
Cloudways supports a large number of PHP extensions/modules according to PHP versions. These PHP extensions are compiled libraries that enable specific PHP functionalities within PHP code for Magento applications.
In order to check all the PHP modules, run php -me via SSH.
PHP OPCache
As per the Magento recommendations, Cloudways allows OPCache accessibility, which is beneficial to handle tons of requests within a few seconds. You can also increase the memory size of OPCache by navigating to the Advanced tab of Settings & Packages.
Staging Environment
Cloudways understands how critical your Magento web application is. That’s why you can fully leverage free unlimited staging URLs before you push your application to the live server.
Ultimately, this improves the development workflow, saving time and money. Check out the GIF below on how to create a staging environment for Magento applications.
Magento Application & Server Backup
It’s normal for ecommerce stores to have tons of updates in a day. Therefore, to mitigate the risk of anything going wrong, Cloudways maintains backups for your Magento application and server so you can restore these if anything unwanted occurs.
Cloudways also offers scheduled and on-demand server-level backups for all the applications deployed on the server.
Similarly, you can take the immediate Magento application backup and restore it anytime.
Server & Application Monitoring
Keep tracking your Magento resources through the Cloudways monitoring tab. You can also integrate the New Relic account for a more detailed overview of the server.
Under the Cloudways Application dashboard, you can check out the complete Access and Error logs
Server Scalability
With the vertical scaling feature, you can easily scale the size of the Magento server at any time without any approval. Moreover, you can step down the resources afterward through the server clone option.
IP Whitelisting, Free SSL & Other Security Features
On the Cloudways console, you can use the IP whitelisting feature for maximum Magento store security. Create a list of trusted IP addresses that you want to permit, and limit unwanted IPs for your Magento server access via SSH or SFTP.
Cloudways offers a 1-click Let’s Encrypt free SSL certificate installation. Still, if you don’t want to use it or have your own SSL certificate, you can configure that as well.
The team of cloud engineers at Cloudways runs the security patches and offers a dedicated firewall that adds extra layers of security on the Magento server.
Support Scope
The Cloudways Support Team has spread out across the globe and is always available 24/7/365. They offer 3 levels of support - Standard, which is FREE, and Advanced and Premium, which are SLA based. You can read more about the Cloudways Support Scope here.
Ultimate Choice!
We’ve covered a lot about the Cloudways platform as it pertains to Magento ecommerce store owners. This includes features like SMTP, team members, Pay-As-You-Go pricing mode, freedom to choose, and the list goes on.
The great thing about Cloudways is that they provide a free demo through their Magento experts to answer technical queries, and offer the 3-day free trial on DO, Linode, and Vultr. Sounds good?
About Author:
Abdur Rahman is the Magento Community Manager at Cloudways. He is growth ambitious, and aims to learn & share information about Ecommerce & Magento 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]
