I would like to suggest that Cloudways publishes an article or other document that describes how Cloudways maintains, patches, updates servers and secures them.

The intent is not to disclose details that puts security at risk but instead demonstrates the value Cloudways is providing in the area of helping its customers maintain a secure server and application environment.

Information should include frequency of update / patch deployment, frequency of security scans for malware / unauthorized access, firewall ports and services that are open especially those for inbound traffic from the Internet, intrusion protection mechanisms, transparency reports for government information requests and legal processes, etc..

This kind of information will help Cloudways demonstrate value being provided. And, it would be helpful for devs, webmasters, and agencies too ... especially when evaluating Cloudways or building solutions / offerings on servers managed via the Cloudways service.

It will also be helpful to those who strive to document our own security practices.

I am a Cloudways customer, and right now what Cloudways provides and does in the realm of security is a big "black box" that offers no details or documentation of such to its customers or prospective customers.

Like I said, a suggestion ... which I believe is a good one.

I don't know if it's just me, but the support quality and speed has been degraded fast lately..

When I just became customer @Cloudways (like a year ago) support was fast and helpful. They took time and really looked into my issues.

Now it's a whole different story. Today for example, I have been on the chat for OVER 2 HOURS. Literally. All this time waiting, following up what the status was, if they weredoing anything. Very little replies. After an hour the first real reply came in which totally missed the boat, wasn't even related to my question.

I pointed this out on the chat and I was transfered to another agent which took a little time for like 2 minutes and then stopped replying too. Also messages are only read half, I need to point out things multiple times which I already mentioned.

When I pointed out this on the chat I received: "actually i am dealing with multiple customers which is wy it got delayed in the response"

We pay a serious extra for the 'managed service and support'. I mean, the prices of DigitalOcean servers are more than doubled. Which is totally find, but please keep your support and service in check..!

More staff maybe?

Oh, and my issue isn't resolved yet. Has been transfered to a ticket, so after 2 hours chatting with really not that much helpful feedback, I now have to wait for a reply on the ticket.

I have found a problem with the Staging deployment for my wordpress sites.
Some plugins and themes store serialised arrays in the wordpress options. This is a valid technique that results in less DB calls.
However, if you simply do a find and replace on URLs in the database, the serialisation of the array will break. This means that the Staging site will lose the settings in the plug-ins and themes.
If you don't realise this, and push the changes back to Live, the Live website will break.

A related problem is with premium plugins and themes that are licensed to a specific domain. Of course, the Staging site is on a different domain, and so some plug-ins may require a different license key.
Again, this is a find and replace challenge when migrating to and from Staging and Production.

I have got around this problem by using WP Migrate Pro plug-in, which performs and intelligent and WordPress optimised migration. Of course, it would have been better to have this functionality in Cloudways.