TL; DR
- Cloudways Autonomous is a managed WordPress hosting solution using Kubernetes for automatic resource scaling.
- Ideal for websites with variable traffic, it ensures optimal performance during traffic spikes.
- Features include automated scaling, edge caching with Cloudflare, unlimited PHP workers, and Redis Object Cache Pro.
- Performance benchmarks show Cloudways Autonomous outperforms competitors like Kinsta and WP Engine in high-traffic scenarios.
- Pricing is competitive, starting at $24/month, offering a cost-effective solution for high-traffic websites.
As a business owner, you likely invest in advertising, email marketing, content creation, SEO, and social media to attract more visitors.
But what happens when your efforts pay off and your web host can’t handle the surge in traffic?
Your website may slow down, potentially jeopardizing your business. Whether you’re managing a busy WooCommerce site or a growing WordPress blog, it’s crucial to have a hosting service capable of handling more traffic to maintain a strong online presence.
Enter Cloudways Autonomous – a revolutionary managed WordPress hosting solution designed to automatically scale resources to meet your website’s demands effortlessly.
In this article, we will explore how Cloudways Autonomous’ advanced features can simplify your hosting experience, enhance site performance, and ensure that your digital presence thrives in the competitive online landscape.
What is Cloudways Autonomous?
Cloudways Autonomous is a managed WordPress hosting option that automatically adjusts its resources to meet your website’s traffic needs in real time. It uses advanced Kubernetes technology to ensure that your hosting capacity fits your traffic, whether it spikes or drops unexpectedly.
How does it compare to Cloudways Flexible (the standard plans)?
The standard Cloudways plan – “Cloudways Flexible” – offers a straightforward cloud hosting solution with a fixed plan. In this plan, you will get a pre-set amount of server resources for your website and pay the same monthly fee regardless of how much you use. If you need more server resources, you must manually upgrade your plan from your Cloudways user dashboard.
This site you are reading right now – HostScore.net, is hosted on Cloudways Flexible plan. It is an ideal hosting solution for websites with steady traffic.
On the other hand, Cloudways Autonomous is ideal for sites with unpredictable and variable traffic. It manages your resources for you, which is essential for rapidly growing sites or those that might experience sudden surges in visitors, like during a marketing push or when content goes viral.
Choosing Cloudways Autonomous means your site stays quick and responsive, no matter how much your traffic fluctuates. This reliability not only improves the user experience but also ensures your site performs well at all times.
Breakdown of Cloudways Autonomous Features
The Cloudways Autonomous platform is designed with several key features that make it particularly effective for managing high-traffic WordPress and WooCommerce sites.
Below is a closer look at what makes Cloudways Autonomous stand out in the crowded field of web hosting solutions:
Automated Scaling
At the heart of Cloudways Autonomous is its automated scaling capability powered by Kubernetes. This feature ensures that CPU and RAM resources are adjusted dynamically to meet the real-time demands of your website.
If traffic spikes due to a promotional event or a sudden increase in visitors, Cloudways Autonomous can scale up resources instantly to handle the load, then scale back down as traffic decreases, ensuring that you only use (and pay for) what you need.
Edge Caching
To further enhance site performance, Cloudways Autonomous integrates Cloudflare’s enterprise-level edge cache and CDN (Content Delivery Network). This setup ensures that your site’s static content, like images and stylesheets, is stored closer to your visitors globally, drastically reducing load times.
Edge caching not only speeds up content delivery but also reduces the load on your server, allowing your website to handle more visitors without a drop in speed.
Unlimited PHP Workers
Cloudways Autonomous excels in managing high traffic by offering unlimited PHP workers. Each PHP worker processes one request at a time, so having more workers means your site can handle multiple requests simultaneously—key during high-traffic periods.
This feature is especially useful for dynamic sites such as those powered by WooCommerce, where each page request might involve complex queries and updates. With unlimited PHP workers, processes like checkout, product pages, and customer logins are quick and efficient, minimizing delays and improving the user experience.
Redis Object Cache
Adding another layer of performance optimization, Cloudways Autonomous includes Redis Object Cache Pro, a premium plugin, at no extra cost.
Redis enhances your database performance by storing data in memory, which significantly speeds up data retrieval times. This is particularly crucial for high-traffic sites that perform a lot of read-and-write operations. With Redis, page load times are minimized even under heavy load, ensuring a smooth and fast user experience.
Performance Testings: Cloudways Autonomous vs Kinsta vs WP Engine
To gauge the real-world capabilities of Cloudways Autonomous, it was put through a series of rigorous benchmarks conducted by experts at Koddr.io (original report here). Koddri.io is a reputable source known for its thorough and reliable performance testing in the hosting / tech industry.
These tests aimed to measure how well Cloudways Autonomous manages low-, mid-, and high-traffic conditions compared to leading competitors.
Methodology
In the benchmark evaluation, the good folks at Koddr.io devised three K6 tests to simulate intensive workloads typical of a major eCommerce sale event.
These tests included: repeatedly accessing the home page and conducting searches on the /shop/ page, completing a full customer checkout journey from visiting the home page to reaching the “order received” page, and an existing customer login and order history view test.
To ensure their results weren’t skewed by full-page caching at the CDN, load balancer, or PHP/origin levels, they designed the tests to bypass these caching layers and primed the targets with shorter-duration tests to mitigate cold start effects.
Each test was set to run for 20 minutes – including a 5-minute ramp-up period and a 30-second cooldown period, with concurrency levels ranging from 5 to 500 users, depending on the test and hosting provider. Test is abandoned at higher concurrency levels when high failure or error rates or timeouts (set at 60 seconds) occurred.
The performance metrics focused on key e-commerce indicators: “add to carts per second” and “checkouts per second.” These metrics were taken from the second test scenario and recorded using K6 counters whenever an add-to-cart or checkout action was successful. This approach gave a clear understanding of how well each hosting solution could manage increased e-commerce demands.
Results
- Performance Under Pressure: Cloudways Autonomous excelled in handling high concurrency, managing up to 6.54 add-to-cart and checkout actions per second with 100 concurrent users. This performance surpassed that of Kinsta and WP Engine, which showed signs of strain under similar conditions.
- Response Times: Cloudways Autonomous maintained fast response times across all tests, with average times consistently staying well below one second, even under heavy load. This showcases its efficient use of resources and advanced caching mechanisms.
- Reliability and Error Rates: Cloudways Autonomous demonstrated remarkable reliability, with error rates remaining below 5% even at high concurrency levels. In contrast, competitors faced higher failure rates, highlighting Cloudways’ robust infrastructure.
The following charts illustrate the average number of add-to-cart and checkout actions per second in three different scenarios: Low, Medium, and High Concurrency. Higher numbers indicate better performance and faster server processing capabilities.
Low Concurrency
Medium Concurrency
High Concurrency
Pricing Comparison: Is Cloudways Autonomous More Expensive?
You might think that greater power comes with a higher cost, right? While Cloudways performs exceptionally well under medium and high traffic conditions, you might wonder if such plans are more expensive.
Surprisingly, they’re not.
Cloudways Autonomous offers competitively priced, flexible plans that start at just $24 per month. This scalable solution meets your traffic needs without the high costs you might see with similar plans from other providers like Kinsta and WP Engine. Kinsta’s plans start at around $30 for very basic services and escalate quickly, while WP Engine’s similar plans for high traffic start at a much higher price point.
This affordability makes Cloudways Autonomous not only a high-performing option but also a more accessible choice for businesses looking to optimize their hosting budget without compromising on quality and scalability.
Cloudways Autonomous Plans & Pricing
| Plan 1 | Plan 2 | Plan 3 | Plan 4 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Price | $24.00 | $63.00 | $101.00 | $168.00 |
| WordPress Application | 1 | 3 | 6 | 10 |
| Disk Space (GB) | 15 | 25 | 40 | 60 |
| Unique Visit | 30,000 | 70,000 | 125,000 | 200,000 |
Kinsta Plans & Pricing
| Starter | Pro | Business 1 | Business 2 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Price | $30.00 | $59.00 | $96.00 | $188.00 |
| WordPress Application | 1 | 2 | 6 | 10 |
| Disk Space (GB) | 10 | 20 | 30 | 40 |
| Unique Visit | 25,000 | 50,000 | 100,000 | 250,000 |
WP Engine Plans & Pricing
| Startup | Professional | Growth | Scale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Price | $20.00 | $40.00 | $77.00 | $194.00 |
| WordPress Application | 1 | 3 | 10 | 30 |
| Disk Space (GB) | 10 | 15 | 20 | 50 |
| Unique Visit | 25,000 | 75,000 | 100,000 | 400,000 |
Conclusion from Test Findings
These findings make it clear that Cloudways Autonomous is not just capable of supporting high traffic efficiently but also offers a more budget-friendly option compared to its main competitors, ensuring that businesses can scale without worrying about excessive hosting costs.
Leveraging Cloudways Autonomous for Your Business Growth
With the proven performance and reliability of Cloudways Autonomous, as demonstrated in the rigorous benchmark tests, businesses are well-equipped to handle the demands of a growing online presence. Utilizing Cloudways Autonomous can significantly boost your operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Here’s how it can become a key component of your business strategy:
- Seamless Scalability: Automatically scales to manage traffic spikes during key business events like sales or marketing campaigns, ensuring your website performs reliably under any load.
- Enhanced User Experience: Maintains fast site speeds even during peak traffic, improving SEO rankings and conversion rates, and keeping customers satisfied with quick, consistent access.
- Focus on Core Business Activities: Reduces the need for technical oversight of web infrastructure, freeing up resources to concentrate on strategic initiatives and core business functions.
- Cost-Effectiveness: Utilizes a pay-as-you-go model, ensuring you only pay for the resources you use, optimizing budget expenditures and eliminating waste.
Conclusion
Cloudways Autonomous has proven itself as a solid and scalable hosting solution. Demonstrating impressive performance in rigorous benchmark tests, it ensures that your website stays reliable and responsive, contributing directly to enhanced user satisfaction and potentially higher sales conversions.
The solution’s automated scaling, seamless integration of advanced technologies like Kubernetes, and unlimited PHP workers ensure that your website can handle sudden surges in traffic without any manual intervention. This allows you to focus on what truly matters – growing your business and engaging with your customers – without worrying about your website’s underlying infrastructure.
Moreover, Cloudways Autonomous offers more than just superior performance; it also provides significant cost advantages. Compared to leading providers like Kinsta and WP Engine, it offers flexible, affordable plans that make high-performance hosting accessible to a wider range of businesses. This affordability, paired with top-tier service, makes Cloudways Autonomous an ideal choice for businesses aiming to manage their hosting expenses effectively while still benefiting from high-quality service.
For those interested in discovering how Cloudways Autonomous can specifically benefit their business operations, or in comparing it with other hosting options, visiting Cloudways directly or reading detailed reviews at our site can offer deeper insights and assist in making informed decisions.
