Our Cloudways Review – Affordable Cloud Hosting For Bloggers

TLDR

1. Move over traditional web hosting platforms, there’s a new and improved option in town. 🤠
2. Enhanced security, a friendlier interface, and a choice of cloud providers? Sign us up. 😍
3. All this for a fraction of the price that web hosts normally charge! 🤑
4. 4.5 stars from 1,500 reviews ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
5. Trusted by G2, TechRadar, PCMag, and more!

Cloudways is a website hosting platform that uses the Cloud to settle all of your hosting needs. It is one of the more popular hosting providers due to its benefits and impressive price point. 😏

Today we will be looking into everything there is to know about Cloudways, including features, price, pros and cons, and more.

What Exactly Is Cloudways?

Cloudways is one of the more unique web hosting platforms that you’ll see, as it gives you the chance to choose which cloud hosting provider you want to use. Instead of being given a cloud host to use, such as Kinsta partnering with Google Cloud, Cloudways gives you more freedom. 🤩🤩🤩

If you were to use Cloudways right now, you would have the choice of using DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon AWS, or Google Cloud.

Cloudways has its own platform for you to use to create servers and choose which cloud host to use super quickly. You’ll have your site up and running within minutes! Plus, there is customer support in case you find any issues along the way. 👌

The best thing about Cloudways offering multiple cloud hosting options is that you don’t have to succumb to the extortionate fees that some of them ask for. Who doesn’t want to save some money? 🤑🤑

Cloudways supports hosting apps like WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Joomla, Laravel, and others.

However, for the purposes of our review, we will be focusing on using Cloudways with WordPress. 

Our Cloudways Speed Test

With any web hosting service, one of the most important things to note is its speed. We ran a real speed test on Cloudways to see how it would perform on a regular basis. 🤔

You can create your server as soon as you sign up for Cloudways, and the bot will recommend creating one with 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, and 1 Core processor. You can also choose a location, and we chose San Francisco. 🌞🌞🌞

Now your server will be ready in a few minutes. Ours took seven minutes to be up and running.

To test the speed of our site, we used Google PageSpeed. Here are the results:

A score of 99 cannot be overlooked. But what did GTmetrix have to say?

Both of our tests showed that Cloudways had a performance rating of 99%. 💪

There is no dispute over the fact that Cloudways is a super fast hosting website. While our site didn’t have any real traffic as a test site, it still gives us a good insight into the performance that you can expect from your Cloudways account. 😎😎😎

Performance And Speed

Cloudways is a cloud-based web hosting provider that boasts an uptime of 99.99%, with loading speeds between 400 and 600 milliseconds. 😮

This is due to the fact that Cloudways partners with DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, Linode, Amazon AWS, and Vultr. These are all considered the best cloud providers on the market (thank you, Cloudways!). 😍😍😍

We tested the speed of Cloudways with both Google PageSpeed and GTmetrics, and both came back with almost perfect results.

Cloudways is available in the following countries: 

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Japan
• Australia
• France
• The Netherlands
• Germany

Most of these options also come with more specific cities within them, so you can choose where your server is based. 👍 This is best for when you want to keep your server as close to the geographical location of your visitors as possible.

For example, here are all of the cities where Cloudways has data centers in the United States:

• Chicago
• San Francisco
• Los Angeles
• Seattle 
• New York
• Dallas
• Newark
• Miami
• Atlanta

If you had a prominent visitor base in one of these cities, setting it as your server’s location could make it faster for these users and encourage new visitors to your site. 👋👋👋

Vertical Scaling

Cloudways offers you the chance to vertically scale your server, which allows you to determine its size depending on your website’s needs.

For example, if you experienced a spike in traffic at any given time, you could allocate more RAM storage space to your server so that it can handle the improved popularity. 😎

Without adding more RAM space, your visitors might experience crashing, slow speeds, or even being kicked out of your website.

Cloudways offers amazing performance and speed to all of its users with these ingenious features. So much so that their loading times are between 40 and 50% better than that offered by shared web hosting! 🥳🥳🥳

Cloudways CDN

Touching more on the speed of this cloud hosting provider, Cloudways also offers a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is composed of a network of data centers and servers that are all geographically positioned between the original server of online content and the user who requests it. 👌👌

Think of it as a spider web where the content has to travel down the strings in order to get from its original location to the user. 🕷️

A CDN offers more data centers along the way, making it an easier path for the data to travel down. This is put in place to deliver content quicker by reducing the latency.

Cloudways offers you the chance to make your server faster for your users for a modest price of just $1 for every 25GB. And the return of visitors you’ll be getting thanks to your much quicker speeds – we’d say it’s more than worth it! 🤗🤗🤗

How Easy To Use Is Cloudways?

Don’t let the sometimes confusing terminology of Cloudways deter you – it is incredibly simple to use. Beginners will have no trouble at all navigating their way through the platform, and you’ll be a pro in no time. 🤓

To create your own dedicated server, you will only need 10 minutes of your time. Ours was created in 7! Cloudways offers tutorials, support, and a friendly interface to make sure that you’re ready to go.

All you need to do is bring your chosen resources and pick which server location you want to use. Even if you need a specific app installed on your computer for your web hosting plan, Cloudways allows you to do this super quickly. 🏃🏃🏃

For example, Cloudways supports the installation of the following applications with just one click: 

• WordPress
• WooCommerce
• Joomla
• And more! 

The same can be said for various types of frameworks (both CMS and PHP), including:

• Laravel
• Symfony
• Cake PHP

These tools might not be the most difficult to install in the first place, but anything that saves us some time is always welcome! 🙌🙌

More About Cloudways Friendly Interface

Any platform that offers a friendly interface is automatically dragged up in our expectations. It makes such a difference for beginners to the platform. Instead of overwhelming us with dozens of applications in front of us, Cloudways uses a clean layout so we can easily see where everything is. ✨✨✨

The Cloudways user panel is split up into eight sections, so let’s quickly explore these now.

Master Credentials

Here lies your personal IP address for your server, as well as SSH and SFTP access details to use with your other applications. Anything you need to input to join your hosting platform with other tools, you’ll find it here. 👌

Monitoring

Under the Monitoring tab you’ll be able to keep track of your server’s bandwidth usage and resources.

Manage Services

Here you can monitor and manage your services like MySQL, Memcached, Apache, and more. 👏👏

Settings And Packages

Choose your own type of PHP, as well as define the PHP settings.

Security

Here’s where you can manage and set your security preferences, as well as whitelist your IP and IP subnets for SFTP and SSH connections. 

Vertical Scaling

Alter the size of your server depending on the resources you need. There’s no need to have such a large server for only a few resources, and vice versa! 🤣🤣

Backups

Choose when to back up your server, as well as how often to do this. You can also perform instant backups anytime you choose.

SMTP

Configure an SMTP service to create outgoing email deliveries on your server under this tab.

As you can see, the interface is where you can control and manage the most important parts of the Cloudways website application. There is also a section for SSH and FTP accesses, in case you want to take on some more complex tasks. 💪💪💪

What About A cPanel?

Unfortunately, in a way to keep the interface as friendly as possible, Cloudways does not offer a cPanel. This might be a disadvantage to some people who have seen the mainstream cPanel blow up in terms of popularity within the last 20 years. 🤩

cPanels have been given overwhelming support from almost all hosting companies. They use these panels to offer easy access to managing their site, domains, and applications.

However, don’t let the absence of a cPanel deter you. Cloudways simply offers an alternative to a cPanel that is just as friendly, simple to use, and well laid out. 👍👍

Is Cloudways Worth The Price?

Cloudways offers plenty of choices for your plan, so you are always in control. First, you’ll need to choose your cloud server from the five choices they support. Once you have chosen this, the price for the four plans will change. 👇

There are four plans for you to then choose from, each getting more expensive than the last.  The changes within the plans are RAM storage, Processor speed, Storage, and Bandwidth.

However, all of the plans come with the following features:

• 24/7 customer support, 365 days a year
• Free SSL
• Free migration
• Team management
• Unlimited application installation
• Dedicated firewalls
• Automated backups
• 24/7 monitoring in real-time
• Staging environment
• Auto healing
• Optimized with advanced caches
• Regular security patching
• HTTP/2 Enabled Servers
• SSH and SFTP access
• Cloudflare add-on

As you can see, you’re getting a whole load of features with any plan you choose. For the cheapest cost (DigitalOcean, 1GB RAM, 1 Core Processor at $12 a month), that’s excellent value for money! 🤑🤑🤑

Cloudways is one of the cheaper cloud hosting providers, even with its higher storage and processor plans. 🧐

Amazon AWS and Google Cloud are more expensive than the other options, but you’re also paying for the benefits that these cloud hosting providers offer you. 😏😏

No matter which server you choose, we think that this is excellent value for money. We were even a little surprised to see the monthly price so low! 😱

What We Loved About Cloudways?

Let us preface this by saying that there are so many things we love about Cloudways. This is a truly excellent platform and we are really happy with how it is working for us. Still, if you’re on the fence about whether to try Cloudways or not, here are a few things we really like. 🥰🥰

Host Websites Without Limitations

You can host an unlimited number of websites or applications through Cloudways without capping out your allowance.

Most hosts will require an additional fee to add another website to your plan, but not Cloudways. You don’t even need to upgrade your plan. 👏

Adding to this, every website or application you add to your account is isolated from one another. This gives your site much better security and is rarely seen across other hosting sites. That gives Cloudways an edge that you won’t find elsewhere! 🤗🤗🤗

Excellent Monitoring Of Your Servers

Many hosting platforms do not give you access to easy visibility of the backend of your servers. This means that you have to blindly trust that you know what’s happening rather than actually being able to see it for yourself.

But not Cloudways! This platform allows you to see the resources you’re using, as well as how your IP requests are working, URL requests, status codes, bot traffic, PHP usage, cronjobs, MySQL, and more. 🤯🤯

All of this information is needed when ensuring that your website runs smoothly. Instead of having to wait for Cloudways to fix an issue that arises, you can see all of this information and work out what the problem is in a fraction of the time.

Cloudways Keeps Your Website Secure

If there’s one thing you want your website to be when using cloud hosting, it’s secure and safe. Cloudways offers caching in place with every payment plan (Memcache and Varnish), and you also have the option of downloading Redis caching. 🥳

(We would recommend installing Redis as this will improve your site’s performance). 😏😏

Cloudways also includes plenty of firewalls and are often coming out with new patches to protect their servers from vulnerable spots.

You also have the option to whitelist any IP addresses that might try and access your server, protecting you further. 😎😎

Two-factor authentication will also prevent anyone from getting into your account through the front door.

Cloudways offers plenty of security measures – whether they’re already put in place or you have the option to set them. This is welcomed by us, as you can never be too careful with the security of your hosting provider! 🙌

What We Didn’t Like About Cloudways?

Now onto what we didn’t like so much about Cloudways. The list is much shorter, but no website hosting platform is perfect!

Customer Support Isn’t The Best

Don’t get us wrong, we have dealt with much worse customer support than what Cloudways is currently offering. However, we have also used web hosts that are known for having the best support out there (we’re looking at you, Kinsta!). 😬

With Cloudways supporting so many different platforms, it makes it much more difficult for their support experts to diagnose any issues you have. This doesn’t mean that they won’t fix the issue for you – but it might take longer than other hosting providers.

Still, Cloudways does offer decent support – and it’s better than other hosting providers we’ve tried. Just don’t expect the issue to be resolved within minutes. 🤷

Cloudways Email Feature Is An Add-On

We mentioned an email feature earlier in our review, but you can only access this if you’re willing to pay the add-on fee.

This isn’t necessarily a disadvantage if you have another email provider to do all of this work for you. 

However, just be aware that there is an additional cost for this feature. The paid add-on is the RackSpace email management tool, and this is a reliable option. However, there are cheaper alternatives out there if you don’t mind using two tools rather than one. ✌️

Comparison: Cloudways Vs Siteground

Siteground is another website hosting platform that uses cloud-based storage. But how does it compare to Cloudways, and which is the best for you? 🤔

Both of these sites perform similarly, with Cloudways having an uptime of 99.99%, 229ms response time, and 0.9s loading time. Siteground had 99.99% uptime, 217ms response time, and 1.1s loading time. 😲😲

As you can see, Cloudways excelled in some aspects while Siteground surpassed it in others. However, these changes are so minimal that they won’t make much of a difference.

Both of these options are easy to use and offer friendly interfaces. Cloudways offers phone support as well as live chat and premium support, while Siteground only offers live chats. 🤷

Siteground offers pricing from $2.99, while Cloudways offers a starting price of $12. However, the former says that its price is discounted from $11.99, so we don’t know if this is a typical saving or just a temporary one.

Either way, we prefer Cloudways over Siteground. While the latter might be cheaper, the former offers better security, more features to play with, and more options for cloud storage. 🤩🤩🤩

Our Verdict

The best thing about Cloudways is that it offers you enough information and control to sort out most issues yourself, as well as the ability to scale server resources efficiently. They offer you support through live chat and phone calls, too. 😎

Cloudways is not for people who don’t want to deal with background information. If you would prefer support experts to do this instead, then you’ll have better luck with another hosting platform.

With that being said, we cannot fault Cloudways. Its price is impressive, the interface is friendly, and the security is top-notch. There is a learning curve that comes with this platform, but it’s not too difficult that it would put you off. 👌👌

Cloudways offers a high-performance web hosting service at a much more affordable price than other alternatives on the market. With a three-day free trial, there is nothing to lose by taking it for a test drive!

So, what are you waiting for? 😁