Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting provider that offers managed servers from the best cloud hosting on the internet to host your websites on.
It offers to host your website on five of the best LaaS cloud hosting platforms including AWS and GCP and create unlimited websites on each server.
Cloudways has been found to help non-developers who want to create their websites on a cloud hosting solution, and they neither want to hire a developer nor spend too much time learning web development.
How does Cloudways work?
Cloudways has bartended with these five leading companies to give you the choice to create your servers from your preferred cloud hosting provider, and Cloudways with do the rest.
When Cloudways creates the server, you can then access and manage the server from the Server Management (Cloudways Control Panel).
You can then be able to monitor your server resources and create and edit the server database, SFTP, SSH credentials, backups, security, scaling, SMTP, packages, and more.
In addition, there’s Application Management, where you control each application and website on the server. From there you can manage the website credentials, cronjobs, domains, SSL, backup and restore for the individual application, and more.
Let’s say that you love DigitalOcean and want to deploy a DigitalOcean server on Cloudways, you will go to the create button and click create a server. Next, you will choose DigitalOcean.
After that, you can choose the server size and resources and then deploy the server. You can scale up or down the size later on.
Read how to create a WordPress website on Cloudways.
Why Cloudways?
Here are some reasons why Cloudways might be the best web hosting choice for your applications and websites.
- Cloudways makes everything so easy: from managing your servers and applications to contacting customer support it’s just so intuitive.
- It is a cloud service: which means your website always performing better, as your website will be stored on cloud servers.
- You can host as many websites as you want on one server with no additional costs. As many as your server resources can handle.
- Pay-as-you-go payment system: you will be charged for the resources you consume and after you consume.
- Security: it offers layers over layers of security and patching.
- Cloudways is a reliable web hosting service with flexible cloud hosting plans.
- The performance and speed are fascinating: It is expected to deliver excellent performance because it provides its servers from the best web hosting companies in the market.
- Prices start at $10/month, which is far cheap than its alternatives Kinsta $35/month, and WP Engine $25/month.
- Save hours of server configurations and error fixing: You can focus on your website building while Cloudways do that for you.
Who Is Cloudways Best For?
- Cloudways is best for beginners who want to sign up for web hosting but don’t know how to configure servers by themselves.
- Best for resellers who design websites for clients and sell them.
- Best for advanced who don’t want to waste time configuring and managing their websites and blogs.
Cloudways Pros & Cons
The PROs:
- Cloudways is very easy to start with, it’s a user-friendly web hosting service.
- The performance is top-notch, which explains why all of the websites that we tested and hosted on Cloudways perform great uptime and loading speed.
- You won’t be charged upfront, instead, you will be invoiced after you consume the resources you created and only the resources you created.
- 3-day free trial for new users to test their services.
- On one server on Cloudways, you can create unlimited websites without additional fees.
- Many built-in features and add-ons such as its own control panel, SMTP, Mailbox, Cloudflare CDN, Auto-healing, CloudwaysBot Protection, and many more.
- Cloudways has a great support team. They say the reply within a few minutes, but when I tried it many times, I got answered immediately.
- The Knowledge Base and community that Cloudways has will answer all the queries that might face you.
The CONs:
- Cloudways doesn’t offer a domain registration service, You will have to buy your domain name from a domain provider such as Namecheap. If you already have your own domain name registered on any domain name registrar, you just need to point the IP of your server to your domain name.
Pricing and Plans
Since Cloudways provides the servers from five different hosting providers, we will see a variety of pricing plans.
If you choose to create your server on DigitalOcean, you get two options, the standard, and Premium servers with the new DigitalOcean technology. And each has its own plans and pricing.
A 1 GB plan on DigitalOcean Standard costs $10 per month with resources of 1 GB RAM, 1 Core Possessor, 25 GB SSD storage, and 1 TB bandwidth. And with this serer you can create as many websites as you want.
For the 1 GB plan on DigitalOcean Premium, you pay $12 monthly and you get the same amount of resources on the Standard option, but you will get the new advanced CPU and NVMe SSD technology.
As managed cloud VPS hosting solution, Cloudways pricing is much lower than many of its competitors such as Kinsta and WP Engine. Read Cloudways vs WP Engine.
Pay-as-you-go Payment System Explained:
Unlike many web hosting companies out there that charge you at least per year, Cloudways is a Pay-as-you-go service, you only pay for the resources you consume.
Let’s assume that you run 3 servers each one costs $10 per month, which means they all cost $30 monthly.
On the 15th day, you changed your mind and decided to merge the 1st and the 2nd servers into the 3rd server.
At the beginning of the new month, You will be invoiced $5 for the 1st server and $5 for the 2nd server and $10 for the 3rd server. You will be invoiced for the services you used in any given month.
If you have funds available in your Cloudways accounts, the invoice will be paid using those funds. And if there are not enough funds available to pay for the entire invoice, the remaining amount will be billed to your registered credit card.
In addition, you can easily estimate your upcoming invoice as per your current usage using the Real-Time Billing feature. This is really a cool feature because you will know in advance what you will pay next month
Performance
Website performance is one of the most important things you should think about when you decide to purchase a web hosting plan because it has a direct impact on user experience and SEO.
When you’re looking for managed hosting, there’s only one thing you really want to know: “Which one will give you the best performance for the lowest price?
This is one of the reasons why we transferred many websites from shared web hosting to Cloudways.
Uptime:
Uptime is the time between when a website goes down and when it comes back up. It’s important to have a high uptime because it means that the system is constantly running and available.
Uptime is essential for many reasons. It ensures that customers are able to access the website, it helps companies maintain their reputation, and It helps you maintain your authority in Google’s eyes.
The uptime stats on one of our websites hosted on Cloudways shows that the uptime for this website is 100% for the last 30 days, and the website faced 13 minutes of downtime in the last 6 months. That is 99.995% uptime.
Speed:
Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your page loads and has a tremendous impact on visitors’ satisfaction and your conversion, as well as search engines ranking.
When it comes to user experience, pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on pages. Also, Google has indicated site page speed as a ranking factor.
Cloudways claims to load WordPress in less than 1 second. To be precise, Cloudways claims to load WordPress in 37 ms and WooCommerce website in 249 ms.
But how do our websites on Cloudways loading speed perform? They scored 1 second Largest Contentful Paint on the Google speed test tool and 0.674 on the GTmetrix speed test.
Data centers:
Datacenters are buildings that contain computer systems and these systems are used to store, manage and process data.
Since the data is stored on a server, it is important to have a location close to the user. This way, the user can access the data faster and with less latency.
Since Cloudways servers are powered by 5 web hosting companies, all of these companies can provide Cloudways with their own data centers. That’s why Cloudways has over 40 server locations around the world.
Therefore, you get a better chance of choosing a closer data center for your customers.
Dedicated Resources:
All servers launched on Cloudways have dedicated resources on a shared physical computer. dedicated CPU cores, dedicated RAMs, dedicated storage space, and dedicated bandwidth usage.
Contrary to the limitations of shared hosting, Cloudways’ dedicated environment allows you to maximize servers and apps performance.
SSD-Based Hosting:
Cloudways host your WordPress website on SSD and NVMe storage. SSD Disks are 3x faster and NVMe are 20x faster, facilitating breathtaking performance and reduced page load times for your dynamic websites.
Features and Addons
There are many Integration features and add-ons that Cloudways provides, from managing emails to security and auto-healing. You can read Cloudways features and addons article to see them all, but here are the most important ones.
- CloudwaysBot Channels: Sends real-time notifications of different selected events via your favorite channels.
- Application Migration: Cloudways migration experts migrate sites with minimal downtime for free. Read how to migrate WordPress to Cloudways.
- SMTP Add-on: Easy way to configure Elastic email addon, or an external SMTP service to be used as a gateway to deliver emails from your servers and websites to your clients.
- Rackspace Email: Business emails powered by Rackspace technology for just $1/month.
- DNS Made Easy Add-on: A premium DNS service so you never have to face DNS errors. If your site goes down all traffic is redirected to a preconfigured secondary IP.
- 24/7 Real-time Monitoring: 24/7/365 real-time server monitoring with 16 different metrics to see if anything goes wrong and fix it.
- CloudwaysBot Notifications: AI bot assistant sends performance insights notifications through Slack, emails, and more to help optimize the server and fix errors.
Cloudways Free Trial:
If you want to test Cloudways by yourself before you upgrade your account to premium, you can start a 3-day free trial “no credit card required”
After the end of the 3-day free trial, you won’t be able to access your server until you upgrade to premium.
With a free trial, you can create your first server with your unique IP address, create websites, and migrate websites to the server.
Support
Good support in web hosting services is essential, especially if you are a beginner, you may face some issues you don’t know how to fix.
From my own experience, all issues I’ve faced, Cloudways support fixed them. They are friendly and willingly assets you.
24/7/365 Live Chat:
Cloudways offers 24/7/365 live chat for all plans. Every request is routed to a specifically trained support team member.
We tested it, every time we call them through live chat, we got our issues solved.
Online Ticketing:
If you don’t want to talk to the support team via live chat, you can use the ticket system to email them and they will email you back.
You just need to go to the tickets page, submit a request,type in your issue, set the priority to normal or urgent, go through all the details, and submit your ticket.
Phone Support:
This is a premium support method, You pay an extra fee for that.
Community:
Cloudways has a big community you can rely on, a community from the Cloudways team themselves and their clients who share their knowledge and answer questions.
So if you are that type of person who prefer to read first before contact support, this is going to be very helpful to you.
Multiple Websites
In many hosting providers, hosting many websites can get very expensive. But in Cloudways, you can set up your server with the number of resources that you want and host multiple websites as many applications and websites as your server resources can handle with one click including:
- WordPress
- PHP
- Magento
- Laravel
- Drupal
- Joomla
- PrestaShop
- OpenCart
The Conclusion: Honest Opinion
We’ve tested many web hosting services shared and cloud hosting, and many of them either have cheap plans pricing but bad performance or good performance but high prices.
With that being said, we found that Cloudways offers many features and great performance at reasonable prices considering that it’s a cloud VPS hosting. Cloudway is the best cloud hosting choice for beginners.
Read Also:
A2 Hosting Review
Bluehost Review
FAQs
How to get Cloudways free?
Cloudways is not a free service. However, you can get a 3-day free trial to test their platform, and no credit card is required.
Can I host many websites on one server on Cloudways?
Yes, you can host as many websites and applications as you want on one server on Cloudways, as much as your server resources can handle, server resources such as storage space. Read how to do that.
Is Cloudways better than BlueHost?
Yes, Cloudways is far better than BlueHost, Cloudways is a cloud hosting with dedicated resources and high uptime and speed while BlueHost is best for shared hosting solution with shared resources.
Is Cloudways good for WordPress?
Yes. Cloudways is one of the best and cheapest for WordPress hosting and it comes with a 1-click install of WordPress and more applications such as Magento.
Is Cloudways a VPS?
Yes, Cloudways is a cloud VPS, you get dedicated resources on a shared physical CPU on the cloud.
Is Cloudways good for eCommerce?
Cloudways is good for eCommerce because it provides a reliable server with lots of resources that will boost eCommerce sites such as bandwidth. It also offers a 1-click wooCommerce on a WordPress installation.
How many websites can I host on Cloudways?
On one server for $10 on Cloudways, you can host unlimited websites as many as your server resources can handle. That could be 15 small websites.
How secure is Cloudways?
Cloudways security is top-notch, it provides many layers of security starting with the SSL certificates, CloudwaysBot protection, CloudwaysBot notifications, Cloudways regular security patching, 24/7 real-time monitoring, SSH access control, Cloudways IP whitelist, and Cloudways auto healing.
Does Cloudways use cPanel?
No, Cloudways doesn’t use cPanel, instead, it uses its own modern built-in control panel for servers and applications. These are the Server Management for servers and the Application Management for applications.
How to contact Cloudways?
Cloudways offers all kinds of support like live chat support, phone call support, and emails. You first sign up or log into the platform, you will see a “Need a hand?” button stuck to the right side of the screen, from there you can chat with Cloudways agents or email them.
How does Cloudways billing work?
Cloudways billing cycle starts when you consume Cloudways resources. Cloudways charges you after you use their servers and integrations and they charge you at the beginning of the new month.
