Cloudways review (2023): In-depth review, Best Features, Pros & Cons, Pricing.

Many expert website owners who want to grow their businesses by migrating from shared hosting to cloud hosting, as well as beginners who want to create a website using cloud hosting, find it difficult to maintain the servers because cloud hosting servers require some prior expertise, so they seek a managed cloud hosting solution.

Cloudways is, hopefully, available. Cloudways is a cloud hosting company that provides managed cloud hosting for websites. In this article, we’ll look at Cloudways’ cost, the flexibility of usage, efficiency, privacy, customer service, and a variety of other factors.

So, what exactly is Cloudways? What services does it provide? And how much does it cost?

Cloudways

Cloudways is a hosting company that provides managed cloud hosting from five different data center providers for your website.

Product Brand: Cloudways

Product Currency: USD

Product Price: 12

Product In-Stock: InStock

Editor's Rating:
4.9

We understand that this review may be too lengthy for some readers, so we tried hard to include all of the important elements of Cloudways. You may use the table below to browse this content if you don’t want to keep reading:

What is Cloudways?

Cloudways, founded in St. Julian’s, Malta, in 2012, has more than 280 workers from 20+ countries, all of whom are dedicated to serving and supporting your business. It hosts more than 570k websites and has about 80k active clients, which include agencies, small businesses, and individuals.

Cloudways, unlike other cloud hosting providers, is a brand-new company. However, it does not provide traditional hosting. It provides a service that configures and manages servers through connections with leading cloud hosting providers such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Vultr, Linode, and DigitalOcean.

So you may think of Cloudways as a middleman between you and the above-mentioned providers that sets up the servers for you in addition to adding layers of security and management on top and giving you access to your server from a nice, clean, beginner-friendly dashboard.

lots of beginners ask the same question, “With so many cloud-based hosting providers that are more popular than Cloudways, why should we select Cloudways as our hosting provider?”.

The explanation is simple: Cloudways offers various unique features and cloud hosting options that none of the other providers have, which sets it apart in a competitive market. We summarized it as follows:

• It allows you to select from five top-tier cloud providers with a single click (as we mentioned above).
• Pricing is adjustable, with budget-friendly pay-as-you-go options available.
• Allows you to sign up for a test run without using your credit card.
• For maximum performance, you may select from various data center locations.
• No programming codes are required. They provide 1-Click Operations for server launch, server or app cloning, monitoring, and many other features.

… and many more topics that we shall cover later.

Keep in mind: that when we say “managed cloud hosting,” we mean that the hosting business will manage the server for you, including updating the operating system, configuring the firewall, deploying security updates, and doing any other activities you require. even if you have no prior server experience. It is a little pricey, but it saves you time and prevents future server troubles.

Pros and Cons of Cloudways

Pros

• Sign up for a trial without using your credit card.
• Pay-as-You-Go Pricing.
• SSL certificates for free.
• Amazing uptime.
• CloudwaysCDN has already been installed.
• Free cache plugins for WordPress and Magento are pre-installed.
• Allows site cloning.
• Every plan includes 24/7/365 online assistance via Live Chat and the Cloudways ticketing system.
• In a single click, you may access five top-tier cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr).
• A server can have an unlimited number of applications.
• Multiple apps may be launched at high performance with a single click. (WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento).
• Servers can be scaled with ease.
• With a few easy clicks, you can transfer servers and billing to your clients.
• Features that promote effective team collaboration.
• A development-friendly staging environment.
• Developers may easily automate their Github accounts.
• Security and backups are controlled.
• 1-Click Operations (server activation, server/app cloning, monitoring, and many more functions).

Cons

• There is no choice for domain registration; you must purchase it from another source.
• There is no email hosting. You must use another Business email provider to create a personalized email address (for example, [email protected]).
• The Content Delivery Network (CDN) costs $4.99 per month.
• Their plans contain too many choices. If you suffer from choice paralysis, the hundreds of Cloudways possibilities will cause you to overthink. Hopefully, we will help you choose your plan in this article.
• CPU and RAM costs are less favorable; they might be prohibitively expensive for high-resource websites that require scalability. Cloudways charges a little bit more than the main five hosting providers mentioned above (since it gives you an extra server managing service).
• Control panels such as cPanel and Plesk are not accessible; this might be annoying for people who have prior knowledge of these control panels, but it will be OK if this is your first time creating a website.

Cloudways Hosting Plans and Options

First, there is something you should understand about Cloudways: when you sign up, you may select from five different data center providers: DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and Google Cloud. Each provider offers various plans.

However, for clarification, we’ll simply highlight only the primarily included plans from each provider. To learn additional information about all of the plans, go to Cloudways’ pricing page.

To make it easier for you, we’ll name them silver, gold, platinum, and diamond. Inside the tables beneath, it appears like this:

1 . DigitalOcean plans:

2 . Vultr plans:

3 . Linode plans:

4 . AWS plans:

5 . Google cloud plans:

In general, the cheapest choice is the $12 per month (or even less if you use our Cloudways discount) entry-level DigitalOcean machine, which already provides good performance. It will provide you with 1 GB of RAM, 1 core CPU, 25 GB of storage, and 1 TB of bandwidth.

You may also go up to the most expensive option with AWS; for example, $3569.98 per month would get you an extraordinarily performant 384 GB of RAM, 96 vCPUs, 20 GB of storage, and 2 GB of bandwidth.

Furthermore, Cloudways is the only low-cost hosting company we know of that allows you to purchase hosting on an hourly basis. For example, the Silver plan at DigitalOcean costs $0.0176/hr, Gold is $0.0361/hr, Platinium is $0.0694/hr, and Diamond is $0.1333/hr.

This is optimal for agencies and resellers that maintain client websites, as well as site operators who anticipate spikes in traffic.

We mentioned all of the capabilities that you’ll receive with the basic Cloudways plans, including all five providers, in the table below, but if you are still uncertain about which plan to select, the easiest location to evaluate all of the rates is to go straight to the pricing page on the Cloudways website.

Cloudways capabilities

Cloudways Speed Test Outcomes

We can certainly state that Cloudways provides exceptional performance, especially when considering the cost you pay. It survived all of our testing, including dependability, server performance, and traffic peaks. Cloudways servers have an incredible ability whenever it comes to handling traffic spikes; they are more effective than what you’d anticipate VPS hosting to give. Although we only employed the lowest DigitalOcean plan for our tests.

In our testing, the company has proven its spot among the best hosting companies that provide the best uptime and the fastest hosting servers in the market.

Uptime checks

Uptime is a metric used to determine website accessibility. A website is “up” if it is available and accessible to users, so “uptime” is the percentage of time it is up.

Instead, if a website is inaccessible and unreachable to your visitors, it is called “down”, and the period that it is down is named “downtime”.

One of the most important aspects of a hosting service is website uptime. Clients or consumers cannot discover you or use your products or services while your website is down, and they may not return. That is why, while selecting a hosting service, you should check their uptime first.

RELATED: Read our in-depth post about what uptime is and which hosting service provides the best.

We utilized a website-monitoring service that examined our test website every 5 minutes to measure its uptime over the preceding 12 months. We combined all the information to establish the averages for each provider shown in the table below. Cloudways has proven to be quite stable. It didn’t even go down once.

Cloudways’ uptime (on DigitalOcean servers) performed admirably during testing, and we were extremely pleased with the outcomes. As seen in the chart above, the statistics could not be better. Keep in mind that the vast majority of Cloudways users enjoy 99.99% uptime, and luckily we’ve got 100% this time. but unfortunately, Cloudways gives no guarantee of uptime.

Is Cloudways quick?

Cloudways’ servers are incredibly fast, so your website’s content is provided to users as rapidly as possible, regardless of how many people are visiting at the same time. Because of the speed-related functionalities mentioned in the list below that Cloudways provides, speed and efficiency will never be an obstacle, the features are:

• Free built-in advanced Caching WordPress Plugin.
• PHP-ready servers (which support the latest version, which is the fastest one).
• Auto-healing servers: If your server fails, Cloudways responds immediately with automated self-healing to reduce downtime.
• CDN (to deliver your site’s content to visitors based on their geographic location).
• Redis support, (assists your site’s database to perform better than ever).
• Dedicated resources (users on servers have dedicated and separate resources from each other, unlike in shared hosting, where all the users share the same server, so you’ll never have to worry because of another site’s extra pull of resources).

Sites that take a long time to load are unlikely to function properly. According to Google research, a one-second latency in website load times can reduce conversion rates by up to 20%.

To see how Cloudways will handle your website speed and uptime, we set up a test website on Cloudways to track uptime and server response time.

According to our tests, the average page loading speed was quite good. With an average page load time of 1.50 seconds, Cloudways was one of the quickest web providers we evaluated, not to mention the unbelievable uptime you’ll get.

As shown in the table below, Cloudways has regularly gotten faster over the last two years. both in absolute terms and in comparison to other web hosts.

Cloudways Backups

In terms of data backup, Cloudways offers two options: you can either manually backup your website using their dedicated backup plugin or allow their software to do it remotely on a daily or hourly basis, depending on your needs.

If you select an automatic backup, you may schedule backups to occur on an hourly or daily basis, every day, every three days, or whenever you wish. You may also choose how long you want to maintain backups, ranging from 1 to 4 weeks.

In addition, for manual backups, you may back up your website at any moment by just clicking a button. (For example, before changing your theme or updating your plugins). Unfortunately, manual backups are not free; you’ll have to pay an additional $0.033 for every 1 GB of data you back up. There is no useful way to get these backups; you must use SFTP for that. It’s a good method, but we wish we could download the files the old-fashioned way.

The backup area is easily accessed from the left menu of the main dashboard. You may plan an automated backup, by choosing a backup frequency, configuring backup retention, and enabling or disabling the local backup option (which lets you create one copy of your site). As seen in the picture below. after you are done choosing your settings, click “SAVE CHANGES”.

As previously stated, Cloudways does not allow you to download backups directly from the dashboard. It would be best if you used SSH or SFTP (Secure FTP) to obtain it. More importantly, it isn’t free; you’ll have to pay $0.033 for every 1 GB of offline data backup.

Cloudways CDN

The term “CDN”, or “Content Delivery Network”, according to Cloudflare, refers to a geographically distributed network of computers that collaborate to enable quick delivery of content online.

A CDN enables the rapid delivery of assets required for the loading of online content, such as HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, pictures, and multimedia. CDN services are becoming increasingly popular, and the bulk of online traffic is now provided via CDNs, including traffic from big sites such as Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon.

A correctly built CDN may also assist with the defense of websites against typical malicious attempts such as distributed denial of service, aka (DDOS) attacks.

Sadly, Cloudways does not offer CDN for free; you must pay extra to utilize it, unlike other services such as WP Engine and Kinsta, which do.

The image below depicts Cloudways’ CDN plans and all of the capabilities that you will receive if you purchase the CDN add-on.

What about Cloudways cPanel?

We all understand fully that cPanel and Plesk are far more advanced than dedicated server management tools, allowing you to control all aspects of hosting from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.

You could be thinking, “Does Cloudways own a cPanel?” Unfortunately, they don’t have one. the company employs a unique server administration system known as the Click&Go Cloud interface, which supports a variety of web applications such as WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, and other tools that allow you to track your server’s resources and utilize other tools.

Without a cPanel, it might be challenging to adjust for all those who are switching from another hosting platform, and you may have some difficulties in the beginning. However, after a few hours of utilizing their interface, you’ll be able to accomplish most things without the need for a cPanel.

But, on the bright side, their custom control panel includes a monitoring function with real-time choices to keep a watch on your site, something few other providers provide (even if they have Plesk or cPanel). in addition to advanced app control, vertical scaling, cache controls, server cloning, and more privileges that Plesk and cPanel do not offer.

Cloudways Support and Customer Service

Support should be a top consideration when selecting a hosting service. Today, any form of business relies solely on web hosting to run successfully. However, there are situations when things do not go as planned.

In our experience with Cloudways support, we found it to be great. It might be a little sluggish (it can take up to 24 hours to react to a ticket), but your problem will be resolved in the end.

Cloudways has a talented tech support staff available 24/7 to answer your questions and handle any issues with your website; you can contact them in three ways. by phone or email, a ticketing system, or live chat help. Customers with full accounts, on the other hand, may send assistance tickets. To use this feature, trial clients must upgrade. All paying clients have access to standard live chat support from a trained staff member 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Please keep in mind that Cloudways offers three support options (add-ons). Standard, Advanced, and Premium: basic assistance is free, while professional help requires the purchase of an Advanced or Premium support add-on.

Cloudways’ customer support group may be better engaged via live chat, phone, or email. But if you are unable to contact Cloudways staff, you can go through their knowledge base. Their user interface provides you with the information you need to solve various problems without needing technical assistance.

FAQs

Add Here are some of the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about Cloudways:

Conclusion

Cloudways is a dependable and cost-effective cloud hosting choice for any website owner, regardless of their experience level or site structure. You will enjoy lightning-fast speeds, excellent site performance, and top-tier protection thanks to its cloud-based infrastructure.

All of this is done to provide your website traffic with the greatest possible user experience while also keeping your site’s data protected from harmful behavior.

However, Cloudways’ characteristics might temporarily make things more difficult for inexperienced website owners. despite the lack of a standard cPanel or Plesk, the inability to register a domain name with Cloudways, and the absence of email hosting functionality. Yet, Cloudways’ managed hosting services will assist you in leveraging the power of the cloud servers for your objectives without the need for any technical knowledge. It will only take some time for you to get used to it.

If you need the capabilities of cloud hosting services but don’t want to deal with the technical difficulties of setting up your site yourself or paying a developer to do it for you, going with them is the appropriate solution for your website in 2023.

Finally. If you’re not sure if Cloudways is the best choice for you, you may test their services for free with their 3 days free trial (no credit card necessary). This is the best approach to determining whether or not it is the ideal host for you.

If you have any questions about Cloudways, please express them in the comments section below. Thank you for your time in reading our Full Cloudways Review.