When running WordPress with RealtyPress Premium, your hosting choice matters more than it does for a typical business website. Your site is doing real work in the background: pulling listings from the REALTOR.ca DDF®, downloading photos, keeping everything up to date, and serving search results to buyers who expect pages to load quickly.
Shared hosting struggles with this kind of workload. Cloudways sits comfortably in the middle, and it is recommended to agents and brokerages running RealtyPress.
Here is why it works so well, and what to look for when you get started.
Why Hosting Matters for RealtyPress
A real estate website is not a static brochure. Every few hours, RealtyPress checks your REALTOR.ca DDF® feed, downloads new listings, updates prices and statuses, and pulls in fresh photos. That is a lot more activity than a typical WordPress site ever sees.
On underpowered hosting, a few things tend to go wrong. Listing syncs stall or time out. Photos fail to download. Search pages load slowly when buyers are browsing. The admin area gets sluggish. None of this is RealtyPress misbehaving; it is the host running out of room to do the work.
What Makes Cloudways a Good Fit
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting service. You choose a cloud provider (DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, AWS, or Google Cloud), we recommend Digital Ocean, and Cloudways handles the technical setup, security, and day-to-day management. You get a clean dashboard, good performance, and support that actually knows WordPress.
Your own server, not a shared space
On shared hosting, you share resources with hundreds of other sites. If one of them has a bad day, your site slows down too. On Cloudways, your site runs on its own dedicated server, so the performance is consistent and predictable.
Grow without switching hosts
Start with a small, affordable server while your site is new. As your traffic grows or you add more listings, you can upgrade with a few clicks. No migrating, no downtime, no re-configuring anything. Most RealtyPress sites grow in ways that are hard to predict, so this kind of flexibility is genuinely valuable.
Cloudways is built for WordPress
Cloudways is set up for WordPress from day one. Caching, security, SSL certificates, and performance tuning are all handled for you. You are not piecing together plugins to make things work, it just works out of the box.
Automatic Backups
Cloudways backs up your site automatically every day. If something goes wrong, whether it is a bad plugin update, a theme change, or just a typo in a setting, you can roll back to yesterday’s version with one click. That peace of mind is worth a lot, especially when your site is your primary lead generator.
Helpful support
Cloudways has 24/7 live chat support, and the staff actually understand WordPress. When something needs attention on the server side, you get an answer quickly, in plain language.
Recommended Setup for RealtyPress
When you sign up for Cloudways, you will be asked a few questions during setup. Here is what we suggest for most new RealtyPress sites.
Pick DigitalOcean as your provider
DigitalOcean offers the best balance of price and performance on Cloudways. Choose the “Premium” option if you see it, since those servers use faster hardware. You will be happier with how everything runs.
Choose a server close to your audience
For Canadian real estate sites, the Toronto data centre is usually the right choice. It keeps your site fast for visitors across Canada, and it keeps your data on Canadian soil.
Start small, scale when you need to
A small or mid-size server is plenty to get started. Cloudways makes it easy to upgrade later if your site grows, so there is no reason to overspend on day one. If you are unsure, their support team can recommend a good starting size based on your needs.
Enable object caching
In the Cloudways dashboard, turn on Redis. This is a simple toggle that dramatically speeds up a RealtyPress site by keeping frequently used data in fast memory. It is one of the highest-value things you can do on day one.
Set up a real cron job
This is an important one for RealtyPress. By default, WordPress uses something called WP cron to run scheduled tasks, and it only runs when someone visits your site. On a brand new site with low traffic, that means syncs can get skipped or delayed. RealtyPress needs those syncs to run reliably on schedule.
The solution is to disable the default WordPress cron and let Cloudways run a real, server-level cron job instead. This is a simple setting in the Cloudways dashboard, and the support team is happy to walk you through it if needed. Once it is set up, your listings sync on time, every time, whether anyone is visiting your site or not.
Common Questions
How does Cloudways compare to WP Engine or Kinsta?
Both are excellent hosts, but they cost roughly two to three times as much for similar performance. For most agents and small brokerages, that extra money is better spent elsewhere. Cloudways gives you comparable speed and reliability at a more sensible price.
Can I run more than one site on Cloudways?
Yes. One Cloudways server can host multiple websites. If you manage a brokerage site and a personal agent site, or several client sites, you can put them on the same server and save money compared to paying for separate hosting accounts.
Is it easy to migrate my existing site?
Cloudways provides a free migration plugin that moves your existing WordPress site over with just a few clicks. They also offer one free migration handled by their team if you prefer. Either way, it is straightforward and there is no long downtime.
What about testing changes before they go live?
Cloudways has built-in staging. You can clone your live site with one click, try out new themes, plugins, or RealtyPress updates safely, and push the changes to your live site when you are happy with them. For a real estate site where the listings feed matters, having a safe place to test is genuinely important.
Getting Started
Cloudways offers a free trial so you can set up a server, install WordPress and RealtyPress Premium, and see how it runs before committing to a paid plan. Most people have a working site up and running within an hour.
Start your free Cloudways trial.
If you have questions about getting RealtyPress set up on a new Cloudways server, feel free to contact support from your account on our website and we can assist. Good hosting is the foundation of a fast, reliable real estate website, and getting it right from the start saves a lot of headaches down the road.
