Cloudways: SafeUpdates for WordPress Out of Beta & New Cloudflare Partnership

Shortly after the announcement of the acquisition by DigitalOcean, Cloudways launched SafeUpdates for WordPress, which allows you to update your websites worry-free. In November, they announced a new partnership with Cloudflare.

SafeUpdates for WordPress

It has certainly happened to everyone that plugin and/or theme updates have failed and WordPress site are no longer accessible, right? We all love the good old 500 Internal Server and 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error messages or the white screen of death, don’t we? In fact, there are still many who do these first on live sites instead of on staging environments. And then also without doing backups first.

For private sites this may be annoying, but a long weekend and lots of strong coffee later and the site should be back up and running again. However, with client sites and mission-critical, high-frequency sites such as WooCommerce store or BuddyBoss communities for example, this is much more problematic. Just think of the loss of revenue or the annoyance of the members.

For Cloudways’ managed WordPress hosting customers, this may be a thing of the past thanks to the latest SafeUpdates for WordPress feature which is now in general availability.

How does it work?

SafeUpdates is an optional Cloudways add-on that fully automates the detection, testing and deployment of WordPress core, theme and plugin updates with just a few clicks – on the spot or at a later time.

Cloudways creates a fresh, off-site backup, runs a staging site for secure testing and automatically rolls back to the previous version in the event of an issue. Plus, SafeUpdates takes the tedious and time-consuming task of testing off your hands.

The system tests then take place in staging and in live environments and include both Visual Regression Testing (VRT) and performance tests as well as multiple End-to-End functional tests. This ensures that your website works flawlessly at all times.

However, if something does go wrong, the system automatically reverts to the previous backup and sends you an email with a detailed error report.

Pricing

SafeUpdates are priced at an affordable $3 per application for up to 5 sites, and $2 per application for 6 sites or more. To enable the SafeUpdates option simply go to the WordPress application in your Cloudways account. There you will find the option at the bottom left under Application Management.

Cloudflare Partnership

Cloudways’ new partnership with Cloudflare Enterprise gives you access to enterprise-grade mitigation of DDoS attacks, a smart firewall (WAF) to block threats at the edge, and enterprise CDN with automatic content optimization that prioritizes your traffic.

The new Cloudways add-on starts at $4.99 per domain, with volume discounts for web professionals bringing the price down to US$1.99 per domain.