Cloudways WordPress hosting is a hosting provider that offers different services from simple server and application launch to ongoing server maintenance.
Cloudways is a perfect fit for blogs, e-commerce stores, and business websites. You can choose from various cloud providers (including Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform), developer and agency-focused workflow, SSL certificate options, and IaaS providers.
You can also sign up for a free trial with no credit card to test the service and check out if it works for you. Great, isn’t it? Read our Cloudways WordPress review to learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of this hosting provider.
Cloudways Hosting Pros & Cons
Each hosting provider has its pros and cons. Cloudways is not an exception. In our review of Cloudways, we have summed them up in a table. It will help you better understand both sides of this hosting platform and make the right choice.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
|
One-click deployment
Fast server speed
Free trial
Pay as you go
Free SSL certificate
Numerous apps support
|
Most add-ons are paid
No domain registration option
No cPanel
You have to pay extra for the emails
Can be hard to use for beginners
|
Cloudways Hosting In Brief
| Characteristic | Information |
|---|---|
| Uptime guarantee | 99.999% |
| Server response time | 786 ms |
| Support options | 24/7 live chat, webchat, phone, or Skype call, online ticketing |
| Hosting plans | Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, Google Cloud |
| CMSs | WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Media Wiki, PHP Stack, Prestashop, WordPress. |
| Features | Server customization, proactive application monitoring, private Slack channel, dedicated environment, Cloudways CDN, auto-healing managed cloud servers, pre-configured PHP-FPM, HTTP/2 supported servers |
| Server locations | United States, United Kingdom, Australia, France, Japan, Germany, Netherlands |
| Starting price | $10/month |
When to Use Cloudways Hosting
This one is famous for its multi-domain hosting on Cloudways, flexible cloud hosting plans, fast setup time, and fantastic uptime. Building a website with Cloudways is easy and straightforward. Just choose a CMS, and here you go. Besides, it provides a lot of e-commerce tools so that you can create a user-friendly online store in a few clicks.
What about scaling? Cloudways provides vertical scaling, which means you can always allocate more RAM to your server if there is a traffic spike on your website. The provider is a perfect choice if you need to create a website quickly, customize it for your needs, and get more freedom to choose the cloud server provider.
When Not to Use Cloudways Hosting
Cloudways requires some technical knowledge, so it’s not the right fit for beginners. If you are not into hosting technical details, you’d better choose another hosting provider.
Also, keep in mind that Cloudways managed hosting doesn’t provide domain name registration, and its plans do not come with electronic mail accounts, so be ready to pay extra for this feature. So Cloudways email hosting lags behind its competitors.
Performance
Be sure to get a high-speed performance when choosing Cloudways. Here’s why. All their servers are in a dedicated environment, which means you can increase server and app performance without bothering about any hosting limitations.
Also, Cloudways provides SSD-based hosting that reduces your page load time. All Cloudways servers are PHP 7.3 ready and use pre-configured PHP FPM to speed up your website and increase the load time.
Has your website experienced some kind of crash? No worries, Cloudways servers use auto-healing, which can automatically resolve several issues. If you have a Magento store, a built-in Full Page Cache will significantly improve your e-commerce store’s performance.
All these features make Cloudways hosting performance work for you and keep your website “safe and sound” around the clock.
Cloudways Hosting Speed Test Results
Do you want to know how Cloudways performs? Our review covers this as well. Read the table below to find out the speed metrics.
| Test | Average Loading Time |
|---|---|
| GTmetrix test | 135 ms |
| Pingdom test | 120 ms |
| PageSpeed Insights (Google) | 125 ms |
As you can see, Cloudways performs incredibly. All Cloudways servers are HTTP/2 enabled, so communication speed between the web servers and clients is always on a high level.
Uptime Guarantees
Cloudways regularly improves its platform and guarantees 99,99% uptime with a 50% decrease in webpage loading times.
Besides, their service level agreement guarantees service availability, 24 hours per day and 365 days per week. To get this, you have to choose one of the packages: standard support, advanced support, premium support.
Server Response Time
Let’s see what Cloudways delivers in terms of server response time. To check it, we use a handy tool Bitcatcha, that measures the server response time in different locations.
In terms of performance, Cloudways gets a thumbs-up for its optimized server speed in different locations. It is mainly because Cloudways partners with Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, Vultr, Linode, and AWS – the industry’s best cloud providers.
Cloudways has servers in United States, United Kingdom, Australia, France, Japan, Germany, Netherlands. You can also choose a specific city so your server will be closer to your target audience. You can also set multi-domain hosting on Cloudways.
Site Migration
Many hosting providers assist the clients in transferring existing websites to their servers. Cloudways offers first site migration free of charge. You need to contact the support team and provide details about your site and its traffic. Then the host will assess your needs and take care of the transfer. Cloudways assures its clients that there will be no downtime during migration.
For a WordPress website, you should try the WordPress Migrator plugin. The host claims that the plugin has been tested on hundreds of hostings and works well in 99% of cases. In case of any difficulties, customer support will help you out.
Types, Features, and Pricing
Cloudways is different from its competitors, so it doesn’t offer traditional shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting plans. Instead, Cloudways clients can choose among hourly cloud hosting packages and pay only for the amount of time they use them.
What about Cloudways hosting pricing? The prices start from $10 for 25GB of storage, 1 TB of monthly data transfers, and a single-core processor. The highest one is $1,045 for 3840 GB of storage, 12 TB of monthly transfers, and a 32-core processor. So, Cloudways has options for different needs and budgets. Let’s review these options in more detail.
Digital Ocean Hosting
The Digital Ocean Hosting prices range from $10 to $80 depending on the RAM, processor, Cloudways hosting plan storage, and bandwidth. You can start free and then pay if you are satisfied.
You don’t need to pay extra to a Digital Ocean or a Digital Ocean account. All plans come with the following features:
- 24/7/365 Support
- Free SSL
- CDN Add-on
- Free Migration
- Unlimited Application Installation
- Team Management
- Dedicated Firewalls
- 24/7 Real-time Monitoring
- Automated Backups
- Staging Environment
- Optimized With Advanced Caches
- Auto Healing
- Regular Security Patching
- HTTP/2 Enabled Servers
- SSH and SFTP Access
It provides you with SSD-based storage with 8 datacenters plus a 3-day free trial.
Linode Hosting
The Linode Hosting prices range from $12 to $90 per month depending on the RAM, processor, Cloudways hosting plans storage, and bandwidth. The price includes Linode hosting charges.
All plans come with the following features:
- 24/7/365 Support
- Free SSL
- CDN Add-on
- Free Migration
- Unlimited Application Installation
- Team Management
- Dedicated Firewalls
- 24/7 Real-time Monitoring
- Automated Backups
- Staging Environment
- Optimized With Advanced Caches
- Auto Healing
- Regular Security Patching
- HTTP/2 Enabled Servers
- SSH and SFTP Access
It provides you with SSD-based storage with eight datacenters plus a 3-day free trial.
Vultr Hosting
The Vultr Hosting prices range from $11 to $84 per month, depending on the RAM, processor, storage, and bandwidth. You also have the option to extend your server storage space without changing other server parameters.
All plans come with the following features:
- 24/7/365 Support
- Free SSL
- CDN Add-on
- Free Migration
- Unlimited Application Installation
- Team Management
- Dedicated Firewalls
- 24/7 Real-time Monitoring
- Automated Backups
- Staging Environment
- Optimized With Advanced Caches
- Auto Healing
- Regular Security Patching
- HTTP/2 Enabled Servers
- SSH and SFTP Access
You don’t need to enter into a contract or pay a fixed amount. Cloudways offers a pay-as-you-go payment model, so you pay only for what you’ve used.
AWS Hosting
Prices for AWS Hosting range from $36 to $284 per month. Note that a free trial is not available for Amazon Web Services. You need to upgrade your account to launch and access AWS servers.
Also, with Amazon (AWS), Disk Sizes are configurable and Bandwidth is on a pay-as-you-go basis. Also, $0.033/GB per server will be applied for off-site backup storage.
Your server is being monitored in real-time 24/7/365 and you can track over 16 different metrics in your console.
Google Cloud Hosting
Prices for Google Cloud Hosting range from $33 to $225 per month. Remember that a free trial is not available for Google Compute Engine. You need to upgrade your account to launch and access GCE servers.
With Google (GCE), Disk Sizes are configurable and Bandwidth is on a pay-as-you-go basis. In addition, $0.033/GB per server will be applied for off-site backup storage.
Ready to choose your plan?
Go to Cloudways hostingSecurity
All the Cloudways hosting plans come with a managed security. First of all, Cloudways offers dedicated firewalls, so all the servers are protected by OS-level firewalls that filter out malicious Cloudways high traffic hosting and keep out the intruders.
Also, they have built-in Let’s Encrypt SSL that improves website security with a certificate that fulfills all HTTPS requirements for free. Cloudways performs regular OS patches on your server to help you avoid vulnerabilities and ensure a secure managed cloud server.
Two-factor authentication is another feature that improves your security. It will keep your Cloudways account safe and sound. Cloudways also partners with Malcare to protect our WordPress website from malicious bots, brute force login attacks, and Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks.
Cloudways Hosting Quick Facts
| Fact | Information |
|---|---|
| Website migration | Free |
| Free features | SSL certificates, free migration, no lock-in, unlimited applications |
| Control panel | Custom |
| Email accounts | Not included |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited |
| CDN | Cloudways |
| Hidden fees | No |
Cloudways Review WordPress: Do We Recommend It?
Yes, we do recommend it in our Cloudways cloud hosting review. First of all, it’s because of Cloudways freedom and a choice they provide to their users. You can choose from a variety of world-class providers such as Google, Amazon, DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr. Also, you can switch PHP versions with just a click.
Cloudways supports the latest versions of PHP 5.6 and 7.x. You can also choose from 60+ data centers, whichever is closer to your target audience, and switch between different databases from MySQL to MariaDB. Moreover, Cloudways provides a 1-Click hosting feature that scales resources (RAM, CPU, and storage) without affecting your website customization.
All these features make Cloudways a great choice for those who always scale and grow their business. Cloudways provides a lot of add-ons for a reasonable price such as CloudwaysBot Channels, Cloudways API, application migration, SMTP, email add-ons, application upgrades, support, and DNS service. Choose the ones you need and always stay on the top.
Ready to choose your plan?
Go to Cloudways hostingCloudways Alternatives
Keep in mind the following Cloudways alternatives and read about them in other Cloudways reviews.
- A2 Hosting — a popular hosting that offers impressive packages, terrific uptime, and incredible customer service.
- Bluehost — one of the largest website hosting providers.
- Siteground — hosting services with top speed, unmatched security, 24/7 fast, and expert support.
- InMotion — a top-rated company with a very reputable track record.
