We were recently hired to do a Magento upgrade of a website hosted with a web host named Cloudways. Our experience with what they were providing and their support when what they provide doesn’t work was bad. That is despite claiming to provide the best managed Magento hosting platform:
Experience faster than ever Magento cloud hosting designed with a fully optimized stack for the best performance, reliability, and security, with 24/7 active support.
The most serious issues was the first big one we ran into. While working on the test of the upgrade, running the update command for Composer managed to cause the server to hang, and it had to be restarted. That shouldn’t happen and being able to run that command is a core part of the upgrade process, so that was a big problem. When the server was restarted, it had a different issue with hanging.
Cloudway’s support was no help in trying to understand what caused the initial hang or how it could be avoided. Instead, they simply suggested running it again and monitoring what happened.
Further usage of the command produced inconsistent results. In some cases, running it errored out and others ran without issue. That isn’t ideal when trying to handle doing an upgrade, where you are trying to carefully manage things.
Whatever is the underlying problem with their server environment and Composer, in our limited experience it didn’t just impact upgrades. After the upgrade, our client was trying to install a new extension through Composer and that also failed because a lack of “memory or swap”. Re-running the process later ran without issue.
An entry on Cloudway’s user suggestion forum indicates that people have been experiencing issues with taking basic actions through Composer since at least 2016.