Why Cloudways Is Ideal For
Your Next PHP Project

Once you have finished developing your app, the next challenge is finding the best hosting solution for your app or website. The performance of the app is greatly dependent on the underlying hosting provider. Even the best app will fail to perform at optimal levels because of a mediocre host. 

Another important consideration is the rather difficult choice between shared, VPS and cloud hosting solutions. Every type of hosting has its own merits and the choice largely depends upon the type of application or website that is being hosted. Similarly, performance requirements also mandate opting for high performing hosting solutions such as Cloud. 

For PHP applications, you need to focus on more technical aspects like caching, configs, databases, etc. because these are essential performance points for any vanilla or framework based PHP application. Additionally, if the app focuses on user engagement (for instance, ecommerce store), the hosting solution should be robust enough to handle spikes in traffic.

Let me introduce Cloudways, a managed cloud hosting platform with the mission statement: "focus on PHP coding, not PHP hosting". Cloudways PHP hosting offers developer friendly hosting solutions with five providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), DigitalOcean, Vultr, KYUP, and Google Compute Engine that cater to everyone from individual developers to software production houses.

Cloudways ThunderStack 

As a developer, you must be familiar with the concept of stack - an arrangement of technologies that form the underlying hosting solution. 

To provide a fast blazing speed and a glitch-free performance, Cloudways has built a PHP stack, known as ThunderStruck. This stack consists of technologies that combine together to offer maximum uptime and page load speed to all PHP applications. Check out the following visual representation of ThunderStruck and the constituent technologies: 

As you can see, ThunderStack comprises of a mix of static and dynamic caches with two web servers, Nginx and Apache. This combination ensures the ultimate experience for the users and visitors of your application.

Frameworks and CMS

The strength and popularity of PHP is the variety of frameworks and CMS available to the developers. Realizing this diversity, Cloudways offers a hassle-free installation of major PHP frameworks including Symfony, Laravel, CakePHP, Zend, and Codeigniter. Similarly, popular CMS such as WordPress, Bolt, Craft, October, Couch, and Coaster CMS could be installed using the 1-click option. The best part is that if you have a framework or CMS that is not on the list, you could easily install it through Composer. 

1-Click Server & Application Installation

Setting up a stack on an unmanaged VPS could take an entire day! 

When you opt for Cloudways managed cloud hosting, the entire process of setting up the server, installation of core PHP files and then the setup of the required framework is over in a matter of minutes. 

Just sign up at Cloudways, choose your desired cloud provider, and select the PHP stack application. And, you are done. Check out the following GIF for more details of the process:

As you can see, your LAMP stack is ready for business in minutes.  

Many PHP applications fail because essential services are either turned off or not set up properly. Cloudways offers a centralized location where you could view and set the status of all essential services such as: 

• Apache
• Elasticsearch
• Memcached
• MySQL
• PHP-FPM
• Nginx
• New Relic
• Redis
• Varnish
   

Similarly, you could manage SMTP add-ons without any issues. 

Pre-Installed Composer & Git 

PHP development requires working with external libraries and packages. Suppose you are working with Laravel and you need to install an external package. Since Composer has become the standard way of installing packages, it comes preinstalled on the Cloudways platform. Just launch the application and start using Composer in your project.

Similarly, if you are familiar with Git and maintain your project on GitHub or BitBucket, you don't need to worry about Git installation. Git also comes pre-configured on Cloudways. You can start running commands right after application launch.

Cloudways MySQL Manager

When you work with databases in PHP, you need a database manager. On the Cloudways Platform, you will get a custom built MySQL manager in which you can perform all the tasks of a typical DB manager. 

However, if you wish to install and use another database manager like PHPMyadmin, you can surely install it by following this simple guide on installing PHPMyadmin.

Server & Application Level SSH 

If you use Linux, you typically use SSH for accessing the server(s) and individual applications. A third-party developer requires application and server level access as per the requirements of the client. Cloudways offers SSH access that could be made available as per the requirements of the client and users:

PHP-FPM, Varnish & Cron Settings

Cloudways provides custom UI panel to set and maintain PHP-FPM and Varnish settings. Although the default configuration is already in place, you could easily change all the settings to suit your own particular development related requirements. In Varnish settings, you can define URL that are to be excluded from caching. You can also set permissions in this panel.

Cron job is a very commonly used component of PHP application development process. On Cloudways Platform, you could easily set up Cron jobs in just a few clicks. Just declare the PHP script URL and the time when the script will run.

Cloudways API & Personal Assistant Bot 

Cloudways provides an internal API that exposes all important aspects of the server and application management. Through Cloudways API, you can easily develop, integrate, automate, and manage your servers and web apps on Cloudways Platform using the RESTful API. Check out some of the use cases developed using Cloudways API. You just need your API key and email for authentication of the HTTP calls on API Playground and custom applications.

Cloudways employs a smart assistant named CloudwaysBot to notify all users about server and application level issues. CloudwaysBot sends the notifications on pre-approved channels including email, Slack and popular task management tools such as Asana and Trello.

Run Your API's on PHP Stack

Do you have your own API that you want to run on the PHP Stack? No problem, because you can do that, too! You can also use REST API like Slim, Silex, Lumen, and others. API’s are used to speed up performance and require fast servers with lots of resources. So if you think that your API response time is getting slow due to the large number of requests, you can easily scale your server(s) within a click to remedy the situation. 

Final Words

Managed cloud hosting ensures that you are not bothered by any hosting or server related issues. For practical purposes, this means that developers could concentrate on writing awesome code without worrying about underlying infrastructure and hosting related issues. Do sign up and check out Cloudways for the best and the most cost-effective cloud hosting solution for your next PHP project! 

Cloudways offers a great deal for PHPJabbers audience. Use the promo code "PHPJABBERS" and get $15 credit to try out our excellent PHP hosting for your next project!