Cloudways Review: CloudWays is a managed hosting company that places a premium on website performance and usability. CloudWays handles everything from server and application installation to continuous server maintenance, security, and upgrades, allowing you to concentrate on developing your business.
I’ve been a CloudWays customer for almost two years. This article will provide a CloudWays Review based on its cost, hosting features, performance, and my own experience.
Cloudways Review
CloudWays primary selling point is its versatility: you may choose from a variety of excellent cloud hosting providers (such as AWS, DigitalOcean, and Google Cloud), host nearly any PHP-based application, get free SSL, improve security, and use developer- or agency-focused processes.
From the time the server and application are activated, the principles of choice and freedom to focus on what is important to the users are there. When you join CloudWays, you gain access to a plethora of advanced tools and services for managing your WordPress, eCommerce, and enterprise websites.
Users can customize the CloudWays platform to their specific operating requirements and business operations by choosing from five IaaS providers (AWS, GCE, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode) and many versions of popular programs (including four flavors of WordPress and two flavors of Magento).
The notion is carried across the platform, with users able to execute roughly 50 server and application management tasks with only a few clicks.
So, whether you’re an online store, an agency, or a freelance developer with multiple clients, CloudWays has the necessary skill set to help you get the most out of your managed hosting service for client chores on your company’s website.
CloudWays vs Traditional Hosting Providers
What makes managed cloud hosting different from conventional WordPress hosting?
In contrast to traditional hosting, which stores your website on a single server, cloud hosting stores your website on a network of global cloud servers. Because your website is spread over multiple servers, it may be readily transferred in the event of a server failure. As a result, downtime with CloudWays is extremely rare.
Cloud hosting increases uptime by allowing another server on the network to take over if something goes wrong. Because the server can detect your customers’ location and provide material from the nearest server, it is frequently faster than traditional hosting. SSDs are used by several cloud servers to improve site speed.
| Features | Traditional Hosting | CloudWays |
|---|---|---|
| Managed Backups | ❌ | ✅ |
| Dedicated Firewalls | ✅ | ✅ |
| 60+ Global Data Centers | ❌ | ✅ |
| Multiple Databases | ❌ | ✅ |
| Cloudflare Enterprise CDN | ❌ | ✅ |
| PHP 7.4 Ready Servers | ✅ | ✅ |
| Seamless Vertical Scaling | ❌ | ✅ |
| SSD-Based Servers | ✅ | ✅ |
| Dedicated Environment | ✅ | ✅ |
| Staging Area & URLs | ✅ | ✅ |
| Auto-Healing Servers | ❌ | ✅ |
| Hosting Free Trial | ❌ | ✅ |
| 24/7 support | ✅ | ✅ |
| Advanced Cache Support | ❌ | ✅ |
| Easy DNS Management | ❌ | ✅ |
Cloud hosts are often more secure than traditional hosts. CloudWays secures your WordPress site in a variety of ways. Cloud servers can scale extremely quickly, which is great if your company’s website has an unexpected rise in traffic.
Pay-as-you-go pricing gives you more control over your hosting expenses. Thanks to dedicated resources, SSD-based WordPress Hosting keeps your site running rapidly.
Let’s look at the CloudWays hosting features and performance. So you can evaluate whether CloudWays is worthwhile for you.
CloudWays Hosting Features
The following are some of the key features that distinguish Cloudways as the best-managed cloud hosting company.
1: Ease of Use (User Experience)
CloudWays is simple to use, especially for non-technical users. When assessing CloudWays’ products, I was pleasantly impressed by how fast and easily people could sign up for a plan or a free trial.
Setting up your cloud server as a customer is simple, and it takes less than 7 minutes to launch your website. All that remains is for you to decide which cloud server to use, how many resources you will use, and where you will put your server.
You can install an application on your web hosting account with only a few mouse clicks from your control panel. WordPress, WooCommerce, Joomla, and more applications may be installed with a single click.
PHP may be installed with a single click in less than five minutes. Those applications and frameworks aren’t difficult to set up for a developer, but saving time is always beneficial.
The CloudWays client control panel is organized into eight sections:
Master Credentials: This file provides the dedicated IP address of your server as well as SFTP and SSH access details for all apps.
Monitoring: Monitoring helps you keep track of the resources and bandwidth used by your server.
Manage Services: Use this section to maintain track of services like Apache, MySQL, and Memcached.
Parameters & Packages: In this area, you can select your PHP version and configure PHP.
MySQL and SSH/SFTP connections: Configure security settings and whitelist IP addresses and IP subnets.
Vertical scaling: This option allows you to adjust the size of your server based on the resources you require.
Backups: Configure backup frequency, automate backups, and run on-demand server backups.
SMTP: Configure your server’s SMTP service to allow outgoing email transmission.
The control panel enables CloudWays users to quickly manage the most important aspects of their website/web application. CloudWays now offers SSH and FTP access if you need to perform more advanced tasks on your host.
CloudWays, on the other hand, prohibits access to CPanel. Some users may dislike CPanel since it has been so widely used over the last two decades, with an overwhelming number of hosting companies employing it to provide consumers with a straightforward way to administer their site, application, and domain.
2: Free SSL Certificate
An SSL certificate adds an extra degree of protection to your website or application by forcing it to use the HTTPS protocol instead of the old HTTP standard. SSL not only secures your website, but it is also a legitimate Google ranking criteria.
SSL certificates are required for all websites, and CloudWays includes one free SSL certificate with each plan. First, because SSL is now widely used, failing to use SSL/HTTPS will make your site appear less serious and reliable than competitors. Second, Google has demonstrated that websites that have an SSL certificate rank higher.
3: Free Website Migration
You may quickly migrate your website to CloudWays hosting using their free site migration tool. CloudWays offers limitless free website migration, saving you the time-consuming and often unpleasant process of migrating your site to your new server.
Regardless of the bundle you choose, CloudWays will migrate your website for free. CloudWays has teamed with BlogValut to make site migration easier, faster, and perfect for WordPress and WooCommerce users.
With the CloudWays site migration plugin, you can relocate your entire website in a single step with no downtime, and the procedure is 80% faster than normal site transfer.
I transferred this website from Kinsta to CloudWays hosting using the CloudWays site migrator plugin, which takes about 6-7 minutes. From my experience, CloudWays site transfer is a really smooth and simple process (you don’t even require customer support assistance).
4: Managed WordPress Hosting platform
Maintained WordPress hosting is a service in which the web hosting business handles the technical parts of WordPress to ensure a trouble-free experience for the customer.
CloudWays offers fully managed WordPress hosting, which is fantastic for small and medium-sized businesses, high-traffic blogs, and eCommerce businesses. You don’t have to worry about the latest WordPress version updates, application speed and security, uptime, backups, or other essential services when you use CloudWays.
5: Cloudflare Enterprise CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers and storage that sits between the origin server and the person requesting online content. A CDN’s purpose is to offer material more quickly by reducing server latency.
Using a dedicated CDN improves the user experience and speeds up your website/application. CloudWays has collaborated with Cloudflare’s Enterprise CDN service to improve website performance and security.
Integrating Cloudflare Enterprise into your Cloudways subscription gives you access to 200+ distinct locations for the Global CDN, as well as an intelligent web application firewall and several performance and security features.
Cloudflare CDN Features:
- 100GB Enterprise-grade CDN
- Enterprise-grade mitigation of DDoS attack
- Secure Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- Polish Image optimization
- Brotli lossless compression
- Mirage Mobile optimization
- Wildcard-encrypted SSL support
- Latest HTTP/3 Support
- Reserved Cloudways IPs, and many more
Cloudflare CDN Pricing:
- Single Domain: $4.99/Month/Domain
- 5-10 Domains: $3.99/Month/Domain
- 10-25 Domains: $2.99/Month/Domain
- 25+ Domains: $1.99/Month/Domain
CloudwaysCDN was powered by StackPath CDN prior to Cloudflare integration, and it was deprecated as of March 22nd, 2022, costing $1 for 25GB of CDN usage.
CloudwaysCDN subscriptions will be phased off at the end of the second quarter of 2022. As a result, I propose Cloudflare CDN (if you can’t afford CloudWays integrated Cloudflare enterprise CDN, utilize free Cloudflare CDN like me).
6: Enhanced Security
One issue to be concerned about is hosting security. Fortunately, CloudWays takes security very seriously, which greatly benefits users.
CloudWays provides free SSL certificates, dedicated firewalls to safeguard your server, IP Whitelisting, frequent OS updating, and much more. I like the following Cloudways hosting security features:
- Cloudflare security at the enterprise level: Cloudways collaborated with Cloudflare to implement DDoS attack prevention and an enterprise-grade firewall to eliminate malicious traffic.
- Login Security: To combat brute-force login assaults, CloudWays employs rate-limiting for SSH and SFTP logins.
- End-to-End Encryption: Cloudways’ servers are fully protected with end-to-end encryption using the most recent HTTPS protocol, ensuring that all data in transit is safe and encrypted.
To reinforce CloudWays hosting and reduce unwanted access to user accounts, CloudWays has also added Two Factor Authentication (TFA) as an additional layer of security.
7: Free Daily Backup
Backups are an essential component of website security because they ensure that no matter what happens, you always have a fresh copy of your entire site (files and database) that can be restored in minutes.
CloudWays provides free managed backups, which allow you to restore your site to a previous state if something goes wrong. CloudWays’ daily backup is an automatic procedure, and restoration is as simple as a single click.
With the “On-Demand Backup” option, you can perform a manual backup. This is the ideal backup solution if you need to make an immediate backup of your website before trying something new.
I prefer to utilize the “UpdraftPlus” WordPress plugin to do full website backups and store backup files to remote cloud storage services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and others.
8: Free Cache Plugins Worth $95/Month
Cloudways has partnered with Object Cache Pro to optimize your WordPress website performance. Object Cache Pro uses cutting-edge caching and compression technologies to solve CPU overhead and network saturation.
As a result, it assists you in reducing the burden on your WordPress website database and server hardware in order to send queries faster. Object Cache Pro is a premium WordPress plugin that costs $95 a month, but CloudWays provides it for free to all users with 2GB or higher servers (not 1GB servers).
9: Hosting Free Trial
Giving a hosting service a chance is the most effective approach to ensuring that it meets your needs. CloudWays recognizes this and offers a free trial to allow you to test everything before purchasing.
Simply follow these instructions to begin your CloudWays free trial:
In the upper right corner of the CloudWays website, click the Start Free option. You must provide your name as well as a valid email address.
There is no need to provide any payment information. The three-day free trial allows you to adequately evaluate CloudWays’ features, performance, and usability. During the trial period, you can subscribe to a premium subscription and have your current site moved to CloudWays.
CloudWays Customer Support
Even if you are a highly technical individual, you will require the services of a technical support team.
CloudWays support teams can assist you with plugin and theme troubleshooting, on-demand database optimization, server error analysis, proactive server monitoring, and other services. CloudWays has three levels of customer service: standard, advanced, and premium.
Standard Support is enough for the majority of consumers. It’s free and provides technical and invoicing support 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as well as Live Chat assistance with any activity on the Cloudways hosting.
You can use the CloudWays Advanced & Premium support add-on if you manage an enterprise-level site or an agency. CloudWays support add-ons shorten support response times and provide access to a broader spectrum of Cloudways expertise through a dedicated Account Manager.
You also get replies from technical experts, deeper server fault diagnosis, customization support, a private Slack channel, and direct phone call support.
I’ve been using CloudWays for more than two years. In my experience, their support crew makes me feel really at ease. They are prompt, kind, and go above and above to assist you. In addition to a support team, CloudWays provides a DIY guide in their knowledge base, which includes numerous thorough articles and YouTube videos.
CloudWays Performance and Speed Test
When selecting a hosting service for my WordPress website, I first evaluate site performance.
CloudWays is a cloud-based web hosting service with a 99.99% uptime guarantee and first server response times ranging from 200 to 350 milliseconds. Here are the server response times (TTFB) for my website in various locations:
The key reason for this is because CloudWays works with some of the greatest cloud providers in the business, including Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, Vultr, Linode, and AWS.
Along with these cloud hosting providers, CloudWays has collaborated with Cloudflare CDN to deliver your website content faster over a network reserved for businesses that is available in 200+ cities worldwide.
CloudWays CDN decreases server latency and provides Brotli compression and image polishing to shorten website loading times and total bandwidth expenditures.
As you are aware, I host this website using CloudWays. Here’s how my website performed on GtMetrix, Pingdom Tools, and Google PageSpeed:
As you can see, my test site received a perfect score of 100/100 from Google PageSpeed Insights on both mobile and desktop. Pingdom gave it an A with a 96/100 speed score, and the GtMetrix test gave me a perfect 100% on both performance and site structure.
CloudWays Pricing 2023
CloudWays managed WordPress hosting costs $10 per month on a pay-as-you-go basis. It implies that you don’t have to pay anything up front; instead, you can evaluate CloudWays hosting performance before paying your monthly payment.
A $10/month Digital Ocean server includes 1GB RAM, a single core processor, 25GB SSD storage, and 1TB bandwidth. It’s sufficient for most persons and small business owners; I also use this server.
- DigitalOcean Server: $14/month to $1,035/month
- Linode Server: $14/month to $1,205/month
- Vultr Server: $13/month to $385/month
- AWS Server: $34.91/month to $3,569/month
- Google Cloud Platform: $33.30/month to $1,290/month
CloudWays pricing is determined by the resources you use. One of the many reasons for the company’s exceptional reputation is that it offers a variety of plans to suit all types of websites, from a simple WordPress blog to a large app.
AWS and Google Cloud are much more expensive than other cloud hosting providers. Vultr strives to offer the best value for money in terms of pricing, resources, and performance. Because CloudWays allows vertical scalability, you can customize your server to meet your specific requirements.
You can start with the most basic choice (Digital Ocean cloud server, 1GB RAM, 1 Core processor) and work your way up as your website or application grows in popularity.
All memberships include unlimited app installation, free SSL certificates, a dedicated firewall, 24/7 server monitoring, and free migration. CloudWays takes credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, and American Express) as well as PayPal payments.
Pros & Cons Of Using CloudWays
Nothing is flawless. Following are some advantages and disadvantages of using CloudWays hosting that I discovered after using it for two years.
Pros:
- Object Pro cache plugin for free (worth $95/month)
- Excellent value-for-money hosting service
- Pay-as-you-go payment model.
- 24/7/365 customer support
- Industry-leading hosting security
- Auto-healing Managed server
- Dedicated Firewall for website protection
- SSH & SFTP Access.
- Completely managed hosting server.
- Unlimited website migration with a WordPress plugin
- Numerous positive feedbacks
- CloudWays simplifies the Cloud hosting experience.
- Automatic WordPress update
- 1-Click complete Backup & Restore
- 24/7 Real-time server monitoring
Cons:
- No free email account with CloudWays (Use Google Workspace)
- Some may see the lack of a CPanel to be a disadvantage.
- There is no need to register a domain name. You must register your domain using a firm such as Namecheap or GoDaddy.
That’s all I’ve got for now. If you have any questions about CloudWays hosting, please leave them in the comments area. You may also forward this post to friends who need a better hosting platform to effortlessly manage their websites.