Why We Recommend Craft Cloud for Fast, Reliable Websites.

Article — Your website should be like your car; fast to start and responsive to users, able to handle heavy traffic and never ever break down. Web servers also have many moving parts — and like cars, they can fail if pushed beyond their limits.

Posted by Chris Sargeant

17.02.2026

The quality of your hosting environment is arguably the most critical factor in your site's performance, security, and long-term stability.

When your website goes down, it hurts. You lose sales because customers just go somewhere else. If the site is down for any period of time, your professional reputation takes a hit, damaging customer trust. Plus, downtime messes with your SEO and how easily people find you in search results.

For organisations investing heavily in digital marketing, reliability isn’t optional.

Downtime for an average website is approximately 3 hours per month, according to downtime metrics from RocketWeb, a leading provider. This contrasts with the widely accepted standard of around 8.76 hours of downtime annually
https://www.rockingweb.com.au/website-downtime-economic-impact-australia/

Cloud Hosting to the Rescue

Over the past decade, website hosting has become significantly more reliable thanks to advancements in cloud-based web hosting. Companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all invested huge amounts of money into products that provide website hosting that—unlike your car— is practically bulletproof.

Unfortunately, however, the usual cloud hosting options are often complicated, lack transparent pricing and arrive with a high price tag, especially as your business grows.

On top of the already excruciating service costs, implementing a working and reliable cloud hosting solution requires technical expertise, and that expertise can cost a lot of money. Cloud solutions can also incur an unseemly amount of technical debt, red tape and vendor lock-in.

Craft Cloud vs. 'The Big Three'

AWS, Microsoft and Google are industry titans, representing the largest and most foundational platforms relied upon for modern website hosting and a vast array of other cloud services.

Unfortunately for a growing business, success often translates directly into higher infrastructure costs on these platforms. A sudden spike in website traffic — perhaps due to a viral campaign, strong SEO growth, or a major product launch — can lead to unexpectedly high monthly bills that strain operating budgets.

This lack of predictable, fixed expenditure makes long-term financial forecasting and budgeting a complex and significant challenge for organisations.

Craft Cloud offers the same high-calibre features, performance metrics, and technological capabilities provided by industry giants such as AWS and Google Cloud, yet fundamentally distinguishes itself by offering a significantly more transparent and predictable pricing model.

Cloud Hosting Essentials

A solid cloud-based website hosting solution requires three core elements, all of which come out of the box with Craft Cloud:

Scalable (or 'Elastic') Infrastructure
Rather than running your website on a single computer with a fixed amount of horsepower, in a scalable setup your website has “power on demand”. If your infrastructure runs out of juice it can instantly spin up more resources to meet changes in load.
A Content Delivery Network
Website pages, images and other static assets are typically stored on the same computer as your website, so each time a page is loaded your web server must respond to requests for all of the assets on the page. A Content Delivery Network (or CDN) stores copies of these pages and assets across the internet so that your web server can rest easy and only respond when absolutely necessary.
A Distributed Databases
A website requires communication with a database to retrieve CMS content and present it to visitors. Traditionally, this database runs on the same server as the rest of the website, which can make database operations complex or slow. Distributed databases improve performance by shifting this workload to a separate, dedicated service.

Security and Reliability

Security is non-negotiable in the current digital landscape, and Craft Cloud provides enterprise-grade security features and reliability that surpass most standard managed hosting providers.

Optimised for Craft CMS
As the platform is purpose-built for Craft CMS, the security architecture is precisely calibrated to mitigate Craft-specific vulnerabilities, offering a superior degree of protection compared to generic hosting solutions.
Automated Updates and Monitoring
Craft Cloud is responsible for managing the underlying server environment, including updates to the operating system and core applications, thereby ensuring continuous security patching and performance maintenance.
High Availability and Redundancy
The underlying architecture is engineered with a focus on redundancy, thereby minimising the probability of downtime. This emphasis on high availability guarantees that your website remains accessible to your clientele with near-continuous uptime.