Every passionate blogger wants to improve the performance of their blog by fulfilling the requirements of the visitors & search engines and make leads or conversions. Cloudways Managed WordPress host is not only fast, secure, and highly reliable but it's affordable as well.
Listen, Launching a website and making it a success are two different ball games.
You can follow any of the thousands of online tutorials that can help you create a WordPress website from scratch using different page builders, themes, and other tools. But when it comes to generating traffic and conversions, it all boils down to your efforts and decision-making. One of the most crucial decisions that will determine the success (or failure) of your website is the choice of the fastest WordPress hosting.
Luckily you came to read my Cloudways review instead of asking them, so you will soon find out how good they are. I reviewed all the different types of hosting they provide, their website builder, pricing, uptime, and speed. After taking a look at Cloudways’s pros and cons in each category, there is a star rating for that category.
If you are interested in a specific type of hosting you can skip to that part right away, but I advise that you read the reviews in all sections because you might find some useful information in one of the other categories as well.
What is Cloudways?
Cloudways is a cloud hosting provider that’s built on top of DigitalOcean, Linode, Google Cloud, AWS, and Vultr cloud providers. Cloud hosting is essentially hosting that pulls its resources (storage, memory, CPU) from a network of virtual servers rather than one physical machine. There’s a lot of redundancy built into cloud hosting and that helps to make it more reliable and also to ensure that people abusing server resources don’t affect other people on the server as much as they would in a shared environment.
Although many hosts try to advertise that their shared hosting is “cloud hosting” it’s often not—it’s usually more of a “clustered hosting” situation. Again, the difference is that true cloud hosting doesn’t involve sharing a single server but a setup where resources are split up over many different virtual servers. So, that’s something to keep in mind when you see hosts saying that their customers can “host in the cloud.” In reality, that may just be trying to take advantage of a hosting buzzword.
Another interesting fact about the cloud is that it’s typically cheaper than hosting in a shared environment. The reason for this is that cloud hosting is typically unmanaged, and there is very little support. Also, there are fewer physical machines to manage so that also helps drive the costs down. Really, the main downside to cloud hosting is that it can be difficult to manage for someone who doesn’t have a lot of expertise in dealing with virtual servers (you can also read more about this on the Cloudways site).
How Good Is Cloudways?
Cloudways is a feature-rich cloud hosting service that is quick to start, easy to manage, and made to scale.
This Managed WordPress cloud hosting is globally available in 50+ data centers, and thus you can choose the nearest one for your target audience. Hundreds of web giants have already fallen in LOVE with their flawless service, and therefore they are standing top in the heavily crowded server industry.
At the time of writing this Cloudways review, the company is managing more than 50 thousand active cloud servers, and millions of sites & apps are running smoothly. Their main aim is to provide a feature-rich user experience, and they are delivering what they have promised to do.
Cloudways is a powerful web hosting service with the most hosting choices, catering to anyone from beginner to expert.
To put it simply, Cloudways is best for entry-level beginners searching for a low barrier to entry hosting service. If you’re looking for one of the easiest and affordable website hosts to help you get your site up and running, Cloudways is a great place to start.
Cloudways Highlights:
- Fast & reliable
- Offers scalable resources
- Pricing plans are affordable
- Improved security & backup
- Access Controls/Permissions
- Billing & Provisioning
- Cost Management
- CPU Monitoring
- Credential Management
- Event Logs
- Multi-Cloud Management
- Patch Management
- Performance Analysis
- Scheduling
- Server Monitoring
- Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management
- London
- Singapore
- Amsterdam
- Toronto
- San Francisco
- New York
- Frankfurt
- Banglore
Plans and Pricing:
| $10/mo | $22/mo | $42/mo (Most Popular) | $80/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB RAM 1 Core 25 GB Storage 1 TB Bandwidth | 2 GB RAM 1 Core 50 GB Storage 2 TB Bandwidth | 4 GB RAM 2 Core 80 GB Storage 4 TB Bandwidth | 8 GB RAM 4 Core 160 GB Storage 5 TB Bandwidth |
Data Centers:
- Newark
- Dallas
- London
- Singapore
- Toronto
- Sydney
- Fremont
- Atlanta
- Frankfurt
- Tokyo
- Mumbai
Plans and Pricing:
| $12/mo | $24/mo | $50/mo (Most Popular) | $90/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB RAM 1 Core 25 GB Storage 1 TB Bandwidth | 2 GB RAM 1 Core 50 GB Storage 2 TB Bandwidth | 4 GB RAM 2 Core 80 GB Storage 4 TB Bandwidth | 8 GB RAM 4 Core 160 GB Storage 5 TB Bandwidth |
Data Centers:
- Seattle
- Los Angeles
- Chicago
- Miami
- London
- Paris
- Tokyo
- Sydney
- Silicon Valley
- Dallas
- Atlanta
- New York
- Amsterdam
- Frankfurt
- Singapore
- Toronto
Plans and Pricing:
| $11/mo | $23/mo | $44/mo (Most Popular) | $84/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB RAM 1 Core 25 GB Storage 1 TB Bandwidth | 2 GB RAM 1 Core 55 GB Storage 2 TB Bandwidth | 4 GB RAM 2 Core 80 GB Storage 3 TB Bandwidth | 8 GB RAM 4 Core 160 GB Storage 4 TB Bandwidth |
Data Centers:
- USA – Northern Virginia
- USA – Oregon
- Europe – Frankfurt
- Australia – Sydney
- Asia – Seoul
- South America – Sao Paulo
- United Kingdom – London
- Asia – HongKong
- Europe – Stockholm
- USA – Northern California
- Europe – Ireland
- Asia – Singapore
- Asia – Tokyo
- Asia – Mumbai
- Canada – Montreal
- USA – Ohio
- Europe – Paris
- Middle East – Bahrain
Plans and Pricing:
| $36.51/mo | $86.77/mo (Most Popular) | $176.26/mo | $274.33/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 GB RAM 2 Core 20 GB Storage 2 TB Bandwidth | 4 GB RAM 2 Core 20 GB Storage 2 TB Bandwidth | 8 GB RAM 2 Core 20 GB Storage 2 TB Bandwidth | 16 GB RAM 4 Core 20 GB Storage 2 TB Bandwidth |
Data Centers:
- USA – Iowa
- USA – North Virginia
- Europe – London
- Europe – Belgium
- Canada – Montreal
- Australia – Sydney
- Asia – Taiwan
- USA – South Carolina
- USA – Oregon
- Europe – Frankfurt
- Europe – Netherlands
- Asia – Singapore
- Asia – Mumbai
- Asia – Tokyo
Plans and Pricing:
| $33.18/mo | $73.50/mo (Most Popular) | $138.52/mo | $225.93/mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.70 GB RAM 1 Core 20 GB Storage 2 TB Bandwidth | 3.75 GB RAM 1 Core 20 GB Storage 2 TB Bandwidth | 7.5 GB RAM 2 Core 20 GB Storage 2 TB Bandwidth | 15 GB RAM 4 Core 20 GB Storage 2 TB Bandwidth |
I used a website monitoring tool to track our Cloudways-hosted test site's uptime over a 19-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings my website and sends me an email if it is unable to contact the site for at least 1 minute. The testing data reveals that Cloudways is remarkably stable; in fact, it didn't go down once in the two-week testing period. You shouldn't have to worry about your Cloudways site going down for extended periods of time.
Cloudways Security:
When it comes to security, Cloudways isn’t the most bulletproof provider. Although it does come with some extremely practical security features like SSL certificates, firewalls, automatic backups, two-factor authentication, and bot protection.
SSL certificates
Every one of Cloudways’ plans comes with a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. You can set it up via its one-click installation. Besides that, Cloudways also offers a free Let’s Encrypt Wildcard SSL certificate. This allows you to secure your root domain and all subdomains with a single certificate.
Firewall
All of Cloudways’ servers are protected by OS-level firewalls. This helps to filter out malicious traffic and keep out intruders. What these firewalls do is allow access only to specific ports that are necessary for the applications to function properly.
Besides that, Cloudways also offers a paid option: Sucuri Website Security Firewall (WAF). With prices starting from $149.99/year, Sucuri’s cloud-based WAF aids in preventing hacks and attacks. Quite honestly, that is just plain expensive. Also, there are service providers like DigitalOcean or AWS that do have their own security measures in place.
Bot protection
Cloudways has partnered up with MalCare to offer application-level security protection. Bot protection aims to identify and block all suspicious or malicious traffic like Brute Force, Dictionary attacks, and DDoS to the site. Moreso, it helps to reduce server resource usage on WordPress applications this way. Just make sure it’s activated. You can find “Bot Protection” in your Application Management menu.
Automatic backups
Cloudways performs automatic backups at no extra charge. You can even set the schedule for your backups to hourly, daily, or weekly. Plus, on-demand backups are available, too. So if you need to restore your website, you can do so via its one-click restore.
Two-factor authentication
Regular password protection is proving to be less and less effective, therefore two-factor authentication is crucial for the website’s security. It guarantees that whoever is trying to access your site will be met with an extra layer of security – a code only you have access to.
Cloudways Customer Support:
The various range of customer care support is offered such as email, live chat, and phone calls. The support team is technically efficient in understanding the issue of the customers and able to provide a perfect solution to the issue.
Otherwise, you can go through their supportive page to get the answers to technical queries and faqs. The official blogs of Cloudways also help to clear doubts and give valuable information.
Cloudways Pros:
1. They make the cloud easier:
Cloud servers can be a pain to set up and maintain (as mentioned earlier). Again, the nice thing about Cloudways is that you don’t need to need to be an expert in spinning up virtual servers to host a site in the cloud. Honestly, we’re surprised more companies haven’t come up with a similar business model that allows people to access the cloud easier. It’s a fantastic alternative to shared hosting with the power of the cloud behind it.
2. Their Support is Surprisingly Good:
When it comes to support, we were honestly surprised at how good it is. While they don’t have telephone support (they’re based out of Malta), they do have chat and ticket support. We really like hosts that have chat support in addition to ticket support compared to hosts that have ticket support only. Sometimes it’s nice to get in touch with support right away rather than waiting for a reply to a ticket. It’s also nice not to have to go back and forth in a disconnected dialogue with a technician via a ticketing system when a problem can be solved in real-time in a chat.
3. Their Pricing is Excellent:
When it comes to pricing, they are very hard to beat. For only $5/month, you can spin up a Digital Ocean instance (including their fees) with 512MB ram, 1 processor core, 20GB storage, and 1TB bandwidth. Honestly, that’s really hard to match and while it’s debatable whether or not 512MB of ram is enough to handle WordPress (we think 768MB is really the minimum for fast performance), if you have a lean installation it’s possible that it could work smoothly. Even their 768MB Vultr instance is only $9/month which is incredibly cheap. That’s VPS-level power for a fraction of the price with fully managed support. Really, that’s a deal that’s hard to find and one of the biggest reasons why we’re currently (at the time of writing) hosting a few sites with them.
4. A free trial of the cloud servers is available for 30 days. There is no need for credit details, so there is no need to worry.
5. Unlimited installations on the websites. There are upgrading options to add resources.
6. These hosting services include many useful features, scaling tools, and server monitors.
7. Site backups automatically.
8. Pay-as-you-go pricing system. So, you get billed for what you require after scaling the resources of a server.
9. Cloudways is offering the hosting solution for WordPress, Magento, Moodle, Drupal, Joomla, and many others. Easy to install PHP or a CMS-based system.
10. The site migrations are done free of cost.
11. The feature of 1 – click enables you to start, restart, clone, scale, transfer, and stop servers effortlessly.
Cloudways Cons:
1. Their interface could be a little better
As we mentioned, it’s awesome that Cloudways provides an easy way to manage the cloud with support, but their interface could use a little work. It’s not bad by any means, but it’s something that could be improved. They know this though, as they’re working on a 2.0 version of it that may already be released by the time you read this.
2. Their pricing options can be a little confusing for those new to hosting
If you’re new to web hosting,
Cloudways might be a little confusing to you, especially if you’ve only used a shared hosting environment before or done fully managed to host. If you have any experience with server pricing though, the options should be pretty straightforward.
3. There is no control panel like cPanel or Plesk. They provide their own console to manage applications.
4. To use this hosting service you need to have some technical knowledge. Without it and a passion to learn, you better stay out of this hosting provider.
5. Here, they don’t provide domain registrations and email account. To get this service you can use Bluehost or HostGator.
Final Thoughts:
I did my best to present you with each and every aspect related to Cloudways.
After doing all the research, performance tests, and support analysis, I can say that Cloudways is a reliable and affordable cloud hosting option for any website owner, regardless of skill level or site type.
Because of its cloud-based platform, you can experience blazing fast speeds, optimal site performance, and top-notch security.
All of this is designed to give your site visitors the best user experience possible and keep your site’s data secure from malicious activity.
That said, Cloudways’ differences can make things a little bit complicated for novice website owners at first. There is no traditional cPanel or Plesk, no way to register a domain name with Cloudways, and no email hosting feature.
This adds to the overall hosting price and makes getting started more involved than other comparable hosting providers on the market today.
If you do decide to go with them, weigh the pros and cons before signing up. Or, take advantage of the 3-days free trial period to make sure they have the features you need to scale your business and manage your hosting account.
From there, take the time to read through the documentation and familiarize yourself with this cloud-based platform so you don’t miss out on some of the features that do come with this unique hosting solution.
GET STARTED WITH CLOUDWAYS – 3-DAYs FREE TRIAL
Cloudways Hosting FAQs:
If you have any queries, just get them cleared in my comprehensive Cloudways review!
1. What is the difference between DigitalOcean and Cloudways?
A. In DigitalOcean, you get a server, and you need to configure it. With Cloudways, you get a DigitalOcean server, and quickly you can deploy, manage and monitor the server and application that is ideally configured with just a click from the platform.
2. Does Cloudways offer a money-back policy?
A. NO! The company offers only a free trial for 3-days.
3. Is Cloudways a better hosting for eCommerce sites?
A. Yes! CloudWays is recommended for online stores. It is one of the best eCommerce hosting providers to build successful web stores.
4. How many sites can be hosted on the same server?
A. If you choose a 1GB server, it is possible to host 2-3 blogs that have total traffic of 50K per month.
5. Do they offer free site migration?
A. Yes! The support team offers free migration for one website. However, a site migration can be done on your own through the Migration plugin.
6. Can I use Cloudflare CDN on Cloudways?
A. Yes! You can create a Cloudflare account and set up the Nameserver at Domain Provider. Also, you don’t need to configure anything to work with the Breeze WordPress Cache plugin.
7. Which Cache plugin should I use?
A. Cloudways has a cache configuration at the server level. But still, you may use the WordPress cache plugin Breeze which is easy to configure and gets regular updates.
8. What is CloudwaysBot?
A. The CloudwaysBot is smart assistance that helps you optimize the server and applications. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to send server notifications and application alerts. You will get real-time performance insights through this nifty tool.
9. Why the root access to the server denied?
A. Since Cloudways is the managed cloud hosting platform, if they give you the root access to install the new software or change the system configuration, then there are chances you will break the tools or services that are core to their platform. So, you don’t have root access.
10. When do I pay for the hosting service?
A. Cloudways offer monthly payment plans. You have to pay for the services that you have used in the previous month. You will be paying only for the resources you use.
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