A reliable web host is unlike any other friend when you’re super monitoring your website. You should be able to spread your wings and expand those horizons without all the fuss. In our search of many web-hosting providers, we found one name that is powerful enough to scale your website effectively – Cloudways.

Why Cloudways is a great choice

This Malta-based managed cloud hosting provider ensures you never lag behind due to lack of resources. Cloudways is ideal for speed, security and scalability. You can easily increase your functionality at pocket-friendly prices.

Cloudways provides a layer of abstraction that takes away the trouble of setting up or maintaining the servers. Their data centers are present all across the globe ensuring effective connectivity day in and day out. As the name suggests, they offer managed cloud hosting for e-commerce stores, web developers, designers, bloggers, agencies, SMEs, and startups etc.

If it sounds tempting already, feel free to begin with a three day trial at no cost. Though, three days may not be enough for everyone but it’s better than you think it is. You will be able to build test servers and explore different features without having to provide anything but your email address. No banking, credit card or other sensitive details are required.

Cloudways – Simple, Fast and Convenient

Create a cloud server with Cloudways and host your website(s) on the top five cloud providers of the industry, including: Amazon (AWS), DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, or Google Cloud Platform.

Be rest assured, you will be getting a 99% uptime when hosting your website with Cloudways. The industry leading cloud providers play a vital role to ensure your website does not suffer from excess downtime. Also, you don’t have to have an account with any of these providers as Cloudways will set them up for you.

Unlike shared hosting, Cloudways’ cloud servers provide you with dedicated resources in order to enhance your website’s speed and stability. It supports a variety of performance boosting technologies such as PHP7, Memcached, Varnish, Nginx, Redis and HTTP/2.

Cloudways also offers automated installation of popular apps such as WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, and other PHP-based apps.

A generic ‘PHP application’ option enables installation and you can always manually install whatever else you need. If your websites aren’t too demanding, you can install multiple applications on each server and attach them to different domains with free SSL certificates.

How Cloudways works

1. To begin with, sign up with Cloudways by completing a simple form and clicking on the START FREE button. If you have already signed up, log in to your account.



2. You will have to verify your e-mail in order to complete the signup process. After successful signup, click on the LAUNCH button to initiate the server launch process.



3. Server and Application Details: Select from the list of applications. Name your Application, Server and Select Your Project.
4. Choose from the list of cloud providers. Select your SERVER SIZE based on your expected monthly traffic (No need to worry about unusual spikes as you can always scale your server with just a slider).
5. Now select your desired LOCATION.



6. After entering the Server and Application details, click LAUNCH NOW. You need to wait for a while so that your servers are ready for your use.



7. Once the server is ready, go to Platform and click Applications in the top-left menu. Select the app from the drop-down menu.



8. Go to ACCESS DETAILS > ADMIN PANEL. You will see the login credentials and the URL of your website. Click the URL and use the credentials to log in to your dashboard.

That’s it. Congratulations! You have successfully installed your website on the cloud server of Cloudways. A piece of cake right?

Cloudways: Pros and Cons

Let’s delve deeper into the pros and cons of this managed cloud hosting provider.

Pros

• With the availability of three day free trial featuring 512MB and 1GB of RAM, you can test their cloud servers without paying a dime. Hence, feel free to try out their services before signing up.
• Cloudways offers one website migration at no additional cost.
• Their console is a user-friendly control panel that allows you to manage your server with ease. It includes a variety of useful features. The most distinguished being monitoring the servers and other scaling tools.
• Top-notch web-based technical support is available 24/7 for your assistance.
• Cloudways supports numerous apps without any trouble.
• Enjoy unmatched security with FREE SSL Certificates.
• There are no limitations on installing WordPress websites.
• Their automatic website backups are easy to configure and can be scheduled as per will.
• The pay-as-you-go pricing model ensures that you are only charged for what you consume after scaling server resources.
• In addition to WordPress, Cloudways also offers web-hosting solutions for other content management systems such as Magento, Joomla, Drupal, and Moodle as well.

Cons

• No option to register domains.
• Cloudways is a Platform-as-a-Service company. Hence, unfortunately you cannot use Plesk or cPanel. They provide you with their own console so that you can effectively manage applications hosted on different cloud servers.

• Cloudways is a powerful and a high-performing cloud hosting solution available at a very reasonable price. @cloudways cloudways.com/ via @supermonitoring

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The Final Verdict

With a great balance between functionality and affordability, Cloudways is a powerful and a high-performing cloud hosting solution available at a very reasonable price. It can be a little complicated for the beginners but demanding users will certainly enjoy Cloudways.

Their cloud servers offer a fantastic feature set and you can easily scale resources as your website grows. Their one-stop Cloud Console makes operations simpler for those who are unwilling to deal with command lines or multiple user interfaces.

If by any chance, you’re still on the fence about hosting your website on Cloudways, then sign-up for the 3-day free trial and test their platform to your heart’s content.

The online world is moving to the cloud. From emails to storage and management, you name it and there’s a portal to take it to the cloud. And if one doesn’t keep up with the flow, one tends to drown out too soon. In the times of the Industrial Revolution, building a product from scratch after gathering requirements, monitoring production and testing quality was a challenging task; equally tedious was the marketer and seller’s job. Things changed when modern machines and techniques arrived. If we map the same trend to modern software development, cloud computing has changed things much the same way.

Today whether large or small, all businesses are going the cloud computing way to develop, test as well as sell software. While people starting afresh might have the edge, old players might need a hand with shifting existing methods to the cloud. It is in such a scenario that the need for a sort of a bridge arises. And cloud APIs serve as that bridge. If you have an application, website or product under development and you need to take it to the cloud, the simplest and ideal way to do it would be to have APIs for everything.

The next question would be where to get such cool APIs and how. The answer lies with Mashape.

Mashape – Building the API Economy

Mashape aims to create a revolution in software production by serving as the backbone of the distribution and consumption of data and services through APIs. It can be thought of as an online marketplace where you can buy APIs suiting to your different needs. Mashape makes it easy to distribute, monetize, manage and consume cloud APIs. And where exactly do they get such a huge storehouse of APIs? They’re contributed by a passionate community of developers from all over the world. With public APIs like Twilio, bitcoin and 23andMe under its belt, Mashape is swiftly capturing a large portion of the cloud API online marketplace sector.

Mashape plays a unique role of bringing API providers and consumers in sync. As a provider, you can contribute APIs for free or for remuneration. As a consumer you can browse through thousands of APIs for different purposes and buy the ones you want – simple and awesome!

In short – need an API? Get it from Mashape!

This is how it works

If you’re an API consumer, visit Mashape and click on the green button in the center that says “Explore APIs”. You will then be directed to a page that lists all APIs available for consumption. You can customize the APIs you wish to see through the sorting filters Relevant, Recent, Popular and My APIs (for existing customers) or through Price filters All, Free, Premium and Paid. There are numerous categories that define the APIs at the left hand side of the screen and you may choose to browse only a particular category there. But it would be advisable to look through the entire collection of APIs to be absolutely sure of the one you need.

Once you find an API that interests you, click on it and you’ll see a page displaying details about it and instructions for consuming it. In addition to basic formalities like applying for authentication keys etc, here you’ll be asked to sign up if you wish to consume the API.

Once you’ve signed up, the button prompting you to sign up will change to a drop down having the options – ‘Default Application’ and ‘+ Create New Application’. Select the appropriate option and click on Test Endpoint’ to kick off. On clicking this button a push-out menu will appear displaying the API code from Mashape that you can download or copy and use wherever you want.

Mashape also offers you the opportunity to see the number of developers behind the API and number of people following it. Moreover, you can also report the API as broken if it doesn’t work for you. In this aspect, Mashape makes dealing with APIs extremely easy and crystal clear.

If you’re an API developer, you can contribute your API by clicking on the “Add your API” button on the main screen. On clicking the button you’ll be directed to a page where you have the option to straightaway import (upload) your API documentation or supply the Base URL if your API is already up and running elsewhere. Accompany that with a cool name for the API and click on the “Add new API” button. That’s it, you’re good to go!

Pros Vs Cons

Mashape is an online tool that comes with many plus points.

• For starters, if you have a website or portal that you wish to bring at par with other portals, you needn’t look further that Mashape for readymade APIs of some of the most popular supplementing applications (Spotify, ESPN, Bitcoin, BestBuy, Imgur and many more).
• Consuming APIs is child’s play (literally); all you need to do is sign-up.
• It is an extremely attractive tool for both API developers and consumers alike.
• It serves as one of the best online marketplaces for APIs.
• It’s a boon for API developers where they can showcase their talent and earn popularity or money or both.
• Online means easy access and omnipresence.
• It offers features like application monitoring, API analytics and alert, quota and invoice management, and security.

And the biggest advantage of this tool is that you can use it for free for a large number of free APIs. Of course you need to pay for premium APIs but with a collection as huge as Mashape has, if you don’t have your heart set on a particular API, you can easily find a great replacement of a premium API in the free section.

We still have to figure out a con with Mashape! It’s so downright useful that finding a loophole in it is proving to be quite challenging.

• Need an #API? Get it from @mashape.com! Explore one of the largest marketplaces for cloud APIs mashape.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Verdict

Mashape is a win-win tool for people who’re in love with APIs. So if you’ve never checked it out before, do it NOW! There’s literally so much packed in there that you’ll find it to be a world in itself.

If you value your data, you know you should back it up. Be it personal or professional, some data is just too important to not be secured. That’s the reason tech papers and websites keep publishing articles on data security and backing up needs, and also horrific tales of data loss!! If you don’t want to end up on the wrong side of data loss, you better back up your website data in time.

Your website may contain your company information, product pages, blog posts and more. Do you really think sheer good luck would be enough to keep that entire data safe? Can you imagine staying afloat if all the hard work behind building and maintaining your website went to trash? If the answer to those questions is “No”, safeguard your website with CodeGuard today!

CodeGuard – Your website’s time machine!

Taking backups is a good habit, but taking clever backups is an art. A majority of us still rely on conventional backup techniques like external hard disks, CD/DVDs and the like for securing our data. While these are all still very effective, they themselves run the chance of damage over time. Hence, most people and corporates use Cloud backups today as a robust and ultra-secure backup technique. CodeGuard is probably the most widely used and trusted Cloud backup service available in the market.

Having a Cloud backup means you’ll have the freedom to access your backup data from anywhere in the world. Plus, you won’t need to physically carry any removable devices with you when you want to refer to it. Add to that, the benefit of saving everything over the Internet, and you have a clear winner!

With an efficient and easy to set up interface, CodeGuard makes backing up, monitoring and maintaining your website a piece of cake. Just sign up and you’ll be provided with a 14-day free trial of this awesome service. For signing up, CodeGuard gives you the option to provide the usual details, or alternatively, your PayPal account details if you have one. Using PayPal though facilitates a smoother paying scheme, comes with an attached string – you don’t get the free trial. So choose wisely here!

CodeGuard assures that once you’ve enrolled with them, you can simply forget about your backing up needs. They’ll take of everything. From automatic timely backups to tracking changes to rolling back to previous backups if needed – they’ve got it all under control. You can finally have the peace of mind you wanted!

Why would you need CodeGuard

Maintaining a website is a challenging task. There is so much text and media to take care of. And if your website includes user accounts and their details, its even tougher. You have the additional responsibility of protecting your user’s data too. As such, backing everything up becomes even more crucial.

Modern day websites face many threats including hacking, accidental deletion of data, injections of unwanted code, software upgrade failures and others. Protecting your data means saving yourself from loss of time, money and reputation.

Key benefits of CodeGuard

When it comes to offering significant advantages, CodeGuard shines like a star! The timely automatic backups mean that you have one less thing to remember. You won’t need to set any reminders for this. Just sign-up, setup and forget about it.

CodeGuard proves its real worth if there are many people having access your website’s database. It highlights changes made to code and other data so that you can keep track of what is going on when you’re not around. That gives you the edge and authority to keep tabs on unwanted code injections and data changes on the website. With an easy rollback option to a previous state, CodeGuards makes sure that only the data you want to make public is exposed on your website.

A mere look at the pricing options is enough to realize how cost-effective CodeGuard is. Plus, it is cross-platform – another medal in the bucket!
A section of CodeGuard’s website is dedicated to explain to new users how it works. This section contains text and screen-shots that offer a sneak peek into the tool’s Control Panel that helps potential users understand the tool better.
A nice to have feature to the CodeGuard website is their blog which contains quite informative articles. Accompanied by video tutorials, these articles give a new dimension to learning.

Here’s the catch

The only issue with this brilliant tool is that you can’t start using this tool until you make the payment. That is, even to receive a free trial, you will have to pick a payment plan and fill in your card details. So basically, signing up isn’t free!

To some people that might be a hindrance because when it comes to filling in card details, you can’t be in a lets-try-and-see-how-it-works mode. You’ll want to be sure. It would have been a lot better if users were given the choice to try out the tool only by giving in their basic details – no card details involved. That way, if they love the tool, they will anyways purchase it post the trial. And at that time, they’ll be sure enough!

In the absence of such a setting, you’ll simply have to rely on the testimonials provided on CodeGuard’s website for reference. While some of us might find relying on other user’s statements easy, others might prefer experiencing it themselves first.
So is this really a glitch? Definitely for some, not so much for others!

• Get a time machine for your website and back it up with @CodeGuard codeguard.com/ via @supermonitoring

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Final Words

A good website backup plan includes backing up all the data to a location where it is easy to maintain, manage and restore when needed. What better location for that than the Internet! No access restriction, no time limits and no space constraints. Plus it’s all automated and super smooth. Try out CodeGuard today and experience what so many people have been appreciating.