Review: Templ.io Google Cloud web hosting

I’ve written about web hosting services before as finding good web hosting for your site can be a challenging thing to do. The web hosting market is extremely saturated, there’s so many options out there which can make it difficult to weed through the bad hosts and find the good. I recent stumbled across an interesting new web hosting provider that uses the power of Google Cloud to offer web hosting services. The company is called Templ.io and I’ve been testing their services for over a week now and I have to say I’m impressed.

Getting started with Templ.io

The team over at Templ.io have built an easy-to-use dashboard that offers a seamless experience to setup a WordPress site on the Google Cloud infrastructure. In my tests, smaller sites were easy to migrate over to Templ.io while larger sites required me to get the [friendly] Templ.io team involved to help me out. While receiving help from the folks at Templ.io they were always very kind and professional and worked quickly to ensure that my questions were answered and that my site was fully functioning.

While the Templ.io team is very helpful and knowledgable, they do realize that providing easy migration tools is of the utmost importance. When I spoke with them in detail about this, they assured me that it is a top priority of theirs to streamline the migration process via a new migration plugin.

When you are setting up or migrating your site to Templ.io you will have the choice to select which Google Cloud datacenter you want to utilize. All of the Google Cloud datacenter’s are the same, so it’s recommended that you pick one that is located closest to you and your audience. Additionally, I should note that the cost of data and traffic may vary based on datacenter location, with North America and parts of Europe offering the cheapest data rates.

Once you start start setting up or migrating your website, Templ.io will then set up a Google Cloud server, install Ubuntu linux, NGINX, MySQL, SSL (via Lets Encrypt), and fully configure and optimize the server for WordPress, including installing the latest version of PHP (PHP 7).

The Templ.io dashboard

As I mentioned before, Templ.io offers an easy-to-use dashboard to manage your website(s). Once you setup (or migrate) your site, you will see it listed in the dashboard. By default, Templ.io will assign a random name/word subdomain (e.g. arthur.templ.io) as a temporary placeholder domain until you add your actual domain from their dashboard. Once you add you domain, you can also add additional features like email and file access (or SFTP).

When it comes to file access, it’s not like most traditional hosts which provide you with a username, password, and host, you need to provide an SSH key in the dashboard in order to be able to connect via SFTP. Luckily, if you don’t know how to do that, the folks at Templ.io have created documentation showing you how. I should also note that the team has created a lot of much needed basic documentation for their service already, however, it would be nice to see more in the future.

From the dashboard, you can also get easy access to your site home page, WP Admin panel, and site database using conveniently placed buttons right on the site management page. That’s a small thing, but it’s a nice touch. The database management tool is fairly basic, but it seems to get the job done, though I’d prefer to see something a bit more robust like PHPMyAdmin.

The benefits of Google Cloud web hosting

There are a lot of benefits to using Templ.io and hosting your site on the Google Cloud infrastructure. For one, it’s extremely fast. It’s also extremely scalable. Using Templ.io you always have dedicated CPU and RAM for your site — so there’s no shared resources. In my tests, running BestTechie with Templ.io without any caching plugins was nearly as fast as my site running on DigitalOcean. And remember, that’s without the help of any caching plugins. It was really snappy.

Additionally, because you’re site is being powered by Google Cloud you can easily scale up your plan with Templ.io as you grow with little or no downtime. You can also easily change the datacenter your site is being hosted in with the click of a button, again, with just a few minutes of downtime. Templ.io also offers automated daily backups that are kept for a month without any additional cost (it’s factored into the plans pricing).

Lastly, another great benefit to using Templ.io and Google Cloud is that it’s much more robust. For example, if you run a site on a single server, if that server goes down, your site goes down. That isn’t the case with Templ.io and Google Cloud.

Final thoughts

While the team at Templ.io is definitely mostly focused on WordPress-based sites, they are flexible in terms of working with customers and I’m told would be willing to setup other platforms in addition to WordPress (e.g. how my site runs on WordPress but my forums run on Invision Power Board). I think that flexibility is important, so that’s nice to see. The team has been extraordinarily helpful to me throughout my testing and I think they have developed a great service. Sure you can setup a Google Cloud web server on your own, but it likely won’t be as optimized as the ones at Templ.io or have the added benefit of being completely managed.

Overall, I like the service and would definitely recommend it if you’re looking for a great managed cloud hosting solution.

Pricing for Templ.io starts at $29/month for their small plan, $79/month for their medium plan, and $149/month for their large plan. They can also create fully customized and scalable plans based on your specific needs.