Since Cloudways first appeared on the scene it has completely changed the WordPress hosting landscape, offering users unparalleled flexibility and control. From the ability to choose a preferred server provider, to high performance and reliable support, Cloudways has been an essential resource to WordPress users all over the world.
During the past few years, Cloudways has recognised the needs of two distinct sets of customers: those who want to avoid the complexities of server management and those with busy and larger websites who need a more robust and scalable infrastructure. To address this, Cloudways introduced Autoscale which:
- Provides a managed, hands-off WordPress solution
- Automatically scales your mission-critical websites in response to increased traffic
With managed hosting, you get a hassle-free approach to WordPress. The Cloudways team takes care of server management so you can focus on building your business. No need to worry about mundane server issues or when to upscale or downscale – that’s all managed in the background. Autoscale allows you to focus on other tasks like launching sales promotions or ticket campaigns without worrying about website downtime or performance issues.
With autoscaling, your website can handle sudden spikes in traffic without experiencing any lag time due to technical difficulties. In addition, autoscaling ensures that all necessary resources are available when needed, so your site is never underpowered and remains reliable during periods of heavy use. As a result, you can rest easy knowing that your website will always be able to handle whatever comes its way.
What makes Cloudways Autoscale different?
Cloudways offers a true, fully managed infinitely scalable WordPress solution, which as far as we’re aware, no one else currently provides. Autoscale runs on cutting-edge infrastructure, using Kubernetes with Google Cloud Platform’s most performant machines such as C2, giving you all the power you need.
The fact you can use Kubernetes (or K8s as it’s also known) without having the skills to manage and set it up is a big deal. After all, Kubernetes is a very complex technology. That’s where Autoscale shines and where Cloudways adds value – it takes care of everything end-to-end in the background. This means you can enjoy all the benefits without having to figure things out yourself. Just launch your WordPress websites in a few clicks, and you’re good to go.
Another point to note is that a lot of providers in the industry limit PHP workers. Once you hit that limit, you’re asked to upgrade your plan or pay them more to increase this limit. That’s not the case with Cloudways Autoscale. You get unlimited PHP workers regardless of the plan you’re on. This is great for performance: no matter how much traffic you get, you’ll always have sufficient PHP workers and sufficient compute to serve your WordPress traffic. This eliminates the guesswork involved in managing web resources.
Finally, Autoscale also comes with integrated Object Cache Pro and CloudFare Enterprise, edge caching, enterprise WAF, enterprise SSL, DDoS mitigation, mobile optimisation, and WebP optimisation, alongside cutting-edge infrastructure. There’s no WordPress solution built on top of Kubernetes using C2 machines, and alongside all these other features, it makes Autoscale a solid offering.
Autoscale pricing
There are several available plans to choose from, each of which comes with an upper limit for the number of unique visits, bandwidth and disk space, along with an upper limit for the number of applications that you can install on that plan. All pricing is transparent. You can subscribe, downgrade and upgrade anytime you like.
Coupled with this, if you go beyond your resource limits your website will remain up and running. You only get charged for what you use; simply pay overage fees against the additional resource usage.
For example, if you’re on Plan 1, which allows 100 GB bandwidth, but end up using 150 GB in a month, you’ll pay $5 extra for the 50 GB extra bandwidth usage. (Bandwidth pricing overage is $1/10 GB extra usage at the time of writing – see Cloudways website for up-to-date prices).
Autoscale clients
Autoscale is helping a diverse range of organisations such as ticketing websites, which can often run into challenges with website outages due to traffic spikes. Busy e-commerce websites benefit too as they can run sales and promotions without worrying about their site falling over at the most inconvenient time. After all, this could result in lost sales which can be particularly detrimental if it’s your busiest time of the year.
“With an average of 450+ orders and 1,500 tickets sold daily, the ability to autoscale has been a tremendous help in keeping my client’s holiday event ticket website running smoothly during peak periods (30-40 concurrent orders), reducing customer service requests by 50%”.
Eric Kuznacic
“Autoscale is really being put through the test on our side and must say I am extremely happy with the performance. We have launched our outlet store about 30 min ago, hitting 1800 active users at any given point and Autoscale is handling the influx of orders just fine”
Weston Crewe
If you’re interested in finding out more visit Cloudways Autoscale for fully managed WordPress hosting that automatically scales to meet your website needs.
(This article is based on the recent webinar hosted by Cloudways)
Questions
How much downtime can I expect if I have a traffic spike from a marketing push while I wait for scaling to occur?
Kubernetes scales really fast in around six seconds so you should be fine.
How does Autoscale handle immediate and significant spikes in traffic? How long might the site be unresponsive or experience delays before it scales to the appropriate size?
It takes just a few seconds to scale. Let’s say you are on a plan where every time you hit 70% of your RAM, the scaling happens. It would just take four, five or a maximum of six seconds for a new bot to spin up. There is no material lag or downtime when scaling.
We anticipate a significant one-day surge in ticket sales for our event. Should we make any special preparations?
If you’re on Autoscale, there are no preparations that you need to make because Cloudways takes care of everything.
Are there any resource limits to be aware of, like CPU or RAM? What about database scaling?
Cloudways completely abstracts the CPU, RAM and the compute layer, so you don’t have to worry about anything. With Autoscale, Cloudways takes care of all the resource limits so it’s not something you need to worry about.
Will the database be a bottleneck when traffic spikes in WooCommerce websites?
The good news is that the database scales and there are read replicas which are capable of scaling. Cloudways made read replicas scalable as read replicas are responsible for handling all the read queries. This is how they help solve the problem with WooCommerce websites.
Is there any way to set custom signals when Autoscale is using more resources than we’d like?
Cloudways aims for Autoscale to be completely managed behind the scenes so you can get on with business. However, if this level of control is frequently requested by users, Cloudways says it will definitely think about offering this feature.
What solutions does Autoscale support?
Today Cloudways offers WordPress and WooCommerce for Autoscale. Very soon they’ll support multi-site. It’s hoped that Magento will be offered within a year too.
I already have a CloudFlare account enabled on a domain. Is there any conflict with Autoscale?
There won’t be any conflict if you have a CloudFlare account enabled on the domain as long as you turn off the CloudFlare proxy. Then everything will work fine.
I have many plugins on WordPress, can these be used on Autoscale as well?
There are no WordPress plugins that Cloudways are aware of that are not compatible with Autoscale.
Can you look at the data of an existing website on Cloudways and determine the best plan?
If you have an existing server with Cloudways, you can see how much disk space and bandwidth you use for any particular application. If you use tools like Google Analytics, they can tell you how many visitors you have to help figure out the best plan. The good news is that it’s completely scalable so even if you opted for a plan with lower unique visitors in the first month, your website will remain up and running and serving traffic.
If Autoscale doesn’t work for me can I move back to Cloudways Flexible?
Absolutely. There is no restriction from Cloudways.
How do CRS work?
WP Cron is something that Cloudways has figured out on Kubernetes. Cloudways has a dedicated pod that spins up every five minutes, and it’s responsible for running your WP Cron and Action Scheduler. The WordPress Chron that gets triggered every time a website receives a visit is disabled by default because it’s not a very good way to run WP Crons as it causes a lot of load on the server. If your use case is different and you want it to run every minute, two minutes or maybe 10 minutes, the Cloudways team can change that for you.
Are there any known issues in migration from the Cloudways Flexible plan? Is there any downtime for the migration?
There are no known issues while you migrate from Flexible to Autoscale. There is no major downtime, but you could have a brief glitch when you change your DNS record, but it won’t be more than a minute or two.
Can you easily clone applications from Flexible to Autoscale and back again?
Yes. The Cloudways migrator plugin is also compatible with Autoscale. If you want to move from Flexible to Autoscale, you can use that plugin, and if you want to move from Autoscale to Flexible, likewise you can use that plugin to move back again. If you don’t want to carry out the migration yourself, you can request a managed migration from the Cloudways team.
What is the migration time from the Flexible app to the Autoscale app?
That depends on the size of the website. For a managed migration, Cloudways’ SLA is circa 48 hours. But if you’re migrating using the plugin or doing it by other means, it depends on the size of your website and the data you have to transfer.