Cloudways is a web hosting company based in Malta, which has been in business since 2011. The company focuses on providing quality web hosting services to agencies, developers, and individuals under the core value of shared hosting made simple, fast and convenient.
Cloudways cloud-based hosting solutions focus on managed cloud hosting, managed WordPress hosting, and PHP app hosting (Drupal, Magento, Laravel, Prestashop, etc). Cloudways doesn’t provide shared web hosting.
One obvious strong point of Cloudways, beside a promising cloud hosting environment, is definitely its price. Starting from $10/month, the company is cheaper than most Cloudways alternatives like a2 Hosting or WP Engine.
In this Cloudways hosting review, we will discuss its features and pricing to help you decide if it is the right choice for you, based on your own managed hosting needs.
Cloudways Web Hosting Features
Before discussing Cloudways’ features in details, it is important to note that we ran a real test of their web hosting platform.
As Cloudways offers a free trial, let’s create a test site/application. To do so, you only need your name and a valid email. Once your email is verified, you can create your server.
The process is intuitive and very easy. I decided to follow the Cloudways Bot’s recommendations and created a server with 2GB of RAM, 50 GB SSD Disk and 1 Core processor. It allows you to choose your server location, so I chose New York.
When creating a new server, you can choose to automatically install an app as such as WordPress, Joomla or Magento. For this review, I chose to have WordPress installed.
Clicking the “Launch Now” button creates the server. It took less than 5 minutes for the server to be ready. I was then able to access my new test site. I installed the Astra WordPress theme, but no caching plugin, as I wanted to check the speed of the server.
Let’s see how fast the test site is. First, let’s see what Google PageSpeed Insights has to say:
A score of 100 on both mobile and desktop is indeed very nice. Now, what about Pingdom?
The screenshots above definitely show that Cloudways is fast. Really fast, actually. While a test site with no traffic can’t be compared to a real live site, it definitely provides a good overview of the speed and performance you can expect from them which Cloudways hosting reviews confirm.
Ease of Use
Using Cloudways is easy, even for a non tech-savvy customer. When testing Cloudways plans I have been positively surprised by how the company makes it fast and easy for users to sign-up for a plan or their free trial.
As a customer, creating your own dedicated server is simple and takes less than 10 minutes. You basically only need to choose the amount of resources needed and your server location. If you need a specific application installed on your web hosting plan, you can do it with just a few clicks from your user panel.
Cloudways supports 1-click application install of WordPress, WooCommerce, Joomla, etc. The same applies to CMS and PHP frameworks: Laravel, Symfony, Cake PHP can all be deployed in a click and less then five minutes. Those applications and frameworks aren’t especially hard to install for a developer, but saving time is always welcome.
As you can see on the screenshot above, Cloudways’ user panel is clean and you can easily find what you’re looking for. The customer control panel is divided into 8 sections:
- Master Credentials: Contains your server’s dedicated IP address as well as SFTP and SSH access details for all applications.
- Monitoring: Allows you to monitor your server’s resources and bandwidth usage.
- Manage Services: This section lets you monitor services as such as Apache, MySQL and Memcached.
- Settings & Packages: Allows you to choose your version of PHP and define PHP settings.
- Security: Manage security settings, whitelist your IP and/or IP subnets for SSH/SFTP and MySQL connections.
- Vertical Scaling: This option lets you increase or decrease your server’s size depending on how much resources you need.
- Backups: Schedule backup time, define backup frequency, and perform an on-demand backup of your server.
- SMTP: Configure SMTP service to setup outgoing email delivery on your server.
With the control panel, Cloudways users can easily manage the most vital aspects of their website/web application. Cloudways also offers SSH and FTP accesses for more complex tasks you might want to execute on your server.
On a less positive note, Cloudways does not offer a CPanel access. Some users might find it a disadvantage since CPanel has been so widespread for the last two decades, with an overwhelming amount of hosting companies using it to offer users an easy way to manage their site, application, and domain.
Performance & Speed
As a cloud-based web hosting provider, Cloudways’ uptime is 99.99% and loading speeds are around 400–600 milliseconds. The main reason for this is that the company partners with Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, Vultr, Linode and AWS, which are among the best cloud providers within the industry.
As mentioned above, I personally tested server speed for this review. Google PageSpeed Insights rated my test site 100/100 on both mobile and desktop, while Pingdom rated it A with a 96/100 speed score.
Cloudways has servers in the following countries:
- United States
- United Kingdom
- Australia
- France
- Japan
- Germany
- Netherlands
For many of the countries listed above, it is also possible to select a city, so you can have your server geographically closer to your visitors. In the United States, Cloudways has data centers in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Newark, Atlanta, and Miami.
Cloudways’ vertical scaling allows you to scale your server according to your website/application needs. For example, if your application is experiencing a spike of traffic, you can easily allocate more RAM to your server in order to handle the increase of popularity.
All those features together allow Cloudways to provide an outstanding performance and site speed. Their loading times are 40% to 50% better than those offered by shared web hosting, which user reviews confirm.
What could be better about Cloudways?
There’s a lot to love about Cloudways and it wasn’t easy to write this section – I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel, so to speak!
1. Support could be better
Let me preface this by saying that I’ve been spoiled by using web hosts that are known for stellar support. Kinsta is a good example.
With Kinsta, they’ll help you diagnose issues and that reflects in how expensive they are.
Cloudways don’t do that and they simply can’t due to how much cheaper they are. Also, WordPress isn’t the only CMS they support.
So, if you’re expecting rockstar level support with troubleshooting and the resolution of most issues in 2 minutes – Cloudways probably isn’t for you.
But, it’s worth pointing out that Cloudways support is still better than a lot of web hosts out there.
For example – when I was with Media Temple, I’d regularly wait 45-60 minutes to get onto live chat. With Cloudways I could talk to someone on live chat immediately and they were pretty helpful!
2. Offsite backups are chargeable
This is more of a heads up than a downside to Cloudways. Offsite backups are chargeable and work out around $0.033 per GB.
Considering they’re offsite backups and Cloudways have to pay for these – it’s understandable. Ultimately, they’re reasonably priced.
3. Cloudways includes a CDN but it isn’t free
Again, this is another heads up – CloudwaysCDN does charge for bandwidth.
There are hosts that include a free CDN but most of them use Cloudflare which is free anyway. And not necessarily the best option.
CloudwaysCDN is powered by StackPath which is a paid service so it’s not bogged down powering countless free accounts.
Cloudways have to pay StackPath so it’s understandable that they’d charge extra for this.
It’s reasonably priced but you may find it more beneficial to sign up with StackPath directly – they have a $10/month CDN plan which offers 1TB bandwidth and unlimited websites. There is more set up involved here but you do get access to their dashboard.
Sticking with CloudwaysCDN is far easier and the process is handled automatically, partly due to their Breeze caching plugin.
4. Email is only available through an add-on
If you want emails – you’ll have to use a paid add-on.
This is somewhat understandable as most WordPress managed hosts (e.g. WP Engine) do not support emails either. And, best practice is to host your emails separately.
This paid add-on uses RackSpace email management so it should be very reliable.
Cloudways plans & pricing
Cloudways pricing plans start from $10/month. You can pay by hour if necessary and there are contracts or anything to tie you in.
The price you pay depends on the amount of server resources you want and the cloud hosting provider.
For example, starting prices are:
- Digital Ocean – $10/month
- Linode – $12/month
- Vultr – $11/month
- Amazon AWS – $36.51/month
- Google Cloud – $33.30/month
Amazon AWS and Google Cloud are substantially more expensive than other providers. Vultr appears to offer the best balance between price, resources and performance.
To learn more, visit the Cloudways pricing page.
