Cloudways Review 2023: CloudWays is a managed hosting provider that prioritizes the usability and performance of websites. You can focus on growing your company because CloudWays takes care of all the server and application installation, ongoing server maintenance, security, and upgrades.
I’ve been using CloudWays for about two years now. Based on my personal experience, cost, hosting features, and performance, this article will offer an evaluation of CloudWays.
Cloudways Review
The main selling point of CloudWays is its adaptability: you can select from a wide range of top-notch cloud hosting companies (including AWS, DigitalOcean, and Google Cloud), host almost any PHP-based application, get a free SSL to increase security, and employ developer- or agency-focused processes.
The ideals of choice and freedom to concentrate on what matters to the users are present from the moment the server and application are started. Joining CloudWays gives you access to a wealth of cutting-edge tools and services for managing your eCommerce, corporate, and WordPress websites.
By selecting from five IaaS providers (AWS, GCE, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode) and numerous versions of well-known applications (including four flavors of WordPress and two flavors of Magento), users can tailor the CloudWays platform to their own operating requirements and business operations.
The idea is continued across the platform, allowing users to quickly do about 50 server and application management tasks.
For client tasks on your business website, CloudWays has the expertise to help you get the most out of your managed hosting service, regardless of whether you’re an agency, an online store, or a freelance developer with several clients.
CloudWays vs Traditional Hosting Companies
What distinguishes traditional WordPress hosting from managed cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting saves your website on a network of international cloud servers, as opposed to traditional hosting, which keeps it on a single server. Your website can be easily moved in the case of a server failure because it is dispersed among several servers. Because of this, CloudWays rarely experiences outages.
By enabling a different server on the network to take over if something goes wrong, cloud hosting improves uptime. Usually faster than standard hosting, the server can determine your customers’ location and offer content from the closest server. Many cloud servers employ SSDs to increase 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 | ❌ | ✅ |
Traditional hosts are frequently less secure than cloud hosts. Your WordPress website is secured in a number of ways via CloudWays. If there is an unexpected increase in traffic to your company’s website, cloud servers can grow very quickly, which is wonderful.
You have more control over your hosting costs when you choose pay-as-you-go pricing. SSD-based WordPress hosting keeps your site operating quickly with dedicated resources.
Let’s examine the performance and features of CloudWays hosting. In order for you to determine whether CloudWays is beneficial to you,
Features of CloudWays Hosting
Some of the important characteristics that set Cloudways apart as the best-managed cloud hosting provider include the ones listed below.
1: User Experience (Ease of Use)
Particularly for non-technical people, CloudWays is easy to use. Upon evaluating CloudWays’ offerings, I was pleased to see that users could quickly and simply register for a subscription or a free trial.
It is easy to set up a cloud server as a customer, and it just takes a few minutes to launch your website. Your only remaining tasks are to select the cloud server to utilize, determine how many resources to use, and locate your server.
With only a few mouse clicks from your control panel, you may quickly install an application on your web hosting account. It is possible to install WordPress, WooCommerce, Joomla, and more programs with just one click.
PHP may be set up in less than five minutes with only one click. Although setting up those frameworks and applications is not difficult for a developer, it is always advantageous to save time.
1. The client control panel for CloudWays is divided into eight sections:
Master Credentials: This file contains your server’s dedicated IP address and the login credentials for SSH and SFTP for each app.
Monitoring: Monitoring enables you to keep tabs on the bandwidth and resources your server is using.
Manage Services: Keep track of services like Apache, MySQL, and Memcached using this area.
Packages & Parameters: In this section, you can choose your version of PHP and configure it.
MySQL and SSH/SFTP connections: Configure security options and add IP addresses and IP subnets to a whitelist for MySQL and SSH/SFTP connections.
Vertical scaling: Using this feature, you can change your server’s size according to the resources you need.
Backups: Set the frequency of your backups, automate them, and perform on-demand server backups.
SMTP: Set up the SMTP service on your server so that emails can be sent out.
CloudWays users may easily handle the most crucial elements of their website or web application with the control panel. If you require access to SSH and FTP to carry out more complex operations on your host, CloudWays now provides it.
On the other hand, CloudWays forbids access to CPanel. Because CPanel has been utilized by so many hosting companies to give customers an easy-to-use interface for managing their website, application, and domain for the past 20 years, some users may not like it.
2. Free SSL Certificate
By making your website or application use the HTTPS protocol rather than the earlier HTTP standard, an SSL certificate increases the level of security on your website or application. SSL is a valid Google ranking factor in addition to protecting your website.
All websites need SSL certificates, and each plan from CloudWays comes with one free SSL certificate. First off, not using SSL/HTTPS would make your website look less professional and trustworthy than rivals, as SSL is now extensively utilized. Second, websites with an SSL certificate rank higher, as Google has shown.
Also Read: What is Social Media Optimization?
3. Free Website Transfer
Using the free site transfer tool provided by CloudWays, you can swiftly move your website to their hosting. You can avoid the time-consuming and frequently unpleasant process of moving your website to a new server by taking advantage of CloudWays’ unlimited free website migration service.
No matter the bundle you select, CloudWays will transfer your website at no cost to you. For customers of WordPress and WooCommerce, CloudWays has partnered with BlogValut to make site migration simpler, faster, and ideal.
Your website may be moved in a single step without any downtime using the CloudWays site migration plugin. The process is 80% quicker than a typical site transfer.
Using the CloudWays site migration plugin, I moved this website from Kinsta to CloudWays hosting. This process takes roughly 6-7 minutes. In my experience, moving a site using CloudWays is a really easy and seamless process; you don’t even need help from customer support.
4. Platform for Managed WordPress Hosting
With maintained WordPress hosting, the web hosting company takes care of WordPress’s technical aspects to make sure the user has a trouble-free experience.
Fully managed WordPress hosting is available from CloudWays, and it’s excellent for high-traffic blogs, eCommerce companies, and small to medium-sized enterprises. When you utilize CloudWays, you don’t have to worry about uptime, backups, the most recent WordPress version upgrades, application speed and security, or other crucial services.
5: Cloudflare’s Business CDN
Between the origin server and the individual requesting online content is a network of servers and storage known as a content delivery network, or CDN. The goal of a CDN is to lower server latency so that content is available more rapidly.
Your website or application will load faster and provide a better user experience if you employ a dedicated CDN. To enhance website speed and security, CloudWays has partnered with Cloudflare’s Enterprise CDN service.
CDN by Cloudflare Enterprise
You may access 200+ unique locations for the Global CDN, as well as an intelligent web application firewall, as well as a number of performance and security features, by integrating Cloudflare Enterprise into your Cloudways subscription.
Features of Cloudflare CDN:
- 100GB CDN of enterprise quality
- Enterprise-grade DDoS attack mitigation
- Web Application Firewall Security (WAF)
- Polish image enhancement
- Lossless compression with Brotli
- Mirage Mobile efficiency
- Support for Wildcard-encrypted SSL
- most recent HTTP/3 support
- Reserved IPs from Cloudways, among many others
Pricing for Cloudflare CDN:
- $4.99 a month for a single domain
- $5.99 per month for five to ten domains
- $10–25 Domains: $2.99 Per Month Each
- $1.99 a month for more than 25 domains
Before Cloudflare integration, CloudwaysCDN was powered by StackPath CDN, which was deprecated on March 22, 2022. A 25GB CDN usage license cost $1.
Subscriptions to CloudwaysCDN will be phased down by the end of 2022’s second quarter. In light of this, I recommend Cloudflare CDN (if you can’t afford CloudWays integrated Cloudflare corporate CDN, use the free Cloudflare CDN like I did).
6. Enhanced Safety
Hosting security is one thing to be worried about. Thankfully, CloudWays takes security seriously, which is incredibly advantageous to users.
Free SSL certificates, dedicated server firewalls, IP whitelisting, regular OS upgrades, and much more are all offered by CloudWays. The following Cloudways hosting security aspects are appealing to me:
- Enterprise-level Cloudflare security: Cloudways and Cloudflare worked together to install an enterprise-grade firewall to stop malicious traffic and DDoS attack protection.
- Login Security: CloudWays uses rate-limiting for SSH and SFTP logins to prevent brute-force login attacks.
- End-to-End Encryption: Using the most recent version of the HTTPS protocol, Cloudways’ servers are completely secured with end-to-end encryption, guaranteeing that all data in transit is secure and encrypted.
As an extra measure of security, CloudWays has also implemented Two Factor Authentication (TFA) to strengthen CloudWays hosting and lessen unauthorized access to user accounts.
7. Free Everyday Backup
Because they guarantee that you always have a recent copy of your complete site (files and database) that can be restored in minutes, backups are a crucial part of website security.
If something goes wrong, you can restore your website to a prior state with the help of CloudWays’ free managed backups. The daily backup process with CloudWays is automated, and recovery only requires a single click.
You can run a manual backup using the “On-Demand Backup” option. If you need to quickly create a backup of your website before attempting something different, this is the best backup option.
To do complete website backups and store backup files to remote cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and others, I prefer to use the “UpdraftPlus” WordPress plugin.
8. Free Cache Plugins Worth $95/Month
Object Cache Pro and Cloudways have teamed to improve the performance of your WordPress website. Object Cache Pro addresses CPU overhead and network saturation using state-of-the-art caching and compression methods.
Consequently, it helps you to lighten the load on the server hardware and database of your WordPress website so that queries can be sent more quickly. The premium WordPress plugin Object Cache Pro is available for $95 a month through CloudWays, but it is free for all users with servers that have 2GB or more of RAM (not 1GB servers).
9. Provide a Trial Hosting
The best way to be sure a hosting service fulfills your demands is to give it a chance. Understanding this, CloudWays provides a free trial so you may try everything out before buying.
Just adhere to these guidelines to start your free trial of CloudWays:
Click the Start Free button in the top right corner of the CloudWays website. Both your name and a working email address are required.
You do not have to submit any payment details. You are able to thoroughly assess CloudWays’ functionality, performance, and usability throughout the three-day free trial. You have the option to transfer your present website to CloudWays and sign up for a premium subscription during the trial time.
CloudWays Customer Support
You will need the assistance of a technical support team, even if you consider yourself to be a highly competent person.
In addition to other services, CloudWays support teams may help you with proactive server monitoring, on-demand database optimization, plugin and theme troubleshooting, and server problem analysis. Standard, advanced, and premium customer service levels are available from CloudWays.
For the vast majority of customers, Standard Support is adequate. It’s free of cost and offers live chat support for any activity on the Cloudways hosting in addition to round-the-clock technical and billing support.
The CloudWays Advanced & Premium support add-on is available to you if you oversee an agency or an enterprise-level website. Through a dedicated Account Manager, CloudWays support add-ons reduce response times for support requests and give access to a wider range of Cloudways expertise.
In addition, you receive direct phone assistance, a private Slack channel, deeper server issue analysis, customization support, and responses from technical specialists.
For more than two years, I have used CloudWays. My experience has been that their support staff puts me at ease. They are courteous, timely, and go above and above to help you. CloudWays offers a DIY guide in their knowledge base, which consists of multiple in-depth articles and YouTube videos, in addition to a support staff.
CloudWays Speed and Performance Evaluation
I consider site performance first when choosing a WordPress website hosting provider.
A cloud-based web hosting service called CloudWays offers first-server response times of 200 to 350 milliseconds and a 99.99% uptime guarantee. The server response times (TTFB) for my website at different locations are as follows:
This is mostly because CloudWays collaborates with some of the best cloud service providers available, such as AWS, Google Cloud, Vultr, Digital Ocean, and Linode.
In addition to these cloud hosting companies, CloudWays has partnered with Cloudflare CDN to expedite the delivery of your website’s content across a network designated for enterprises, accessible in more than 200 cities throughout the globe.
In order to reduce server latency and reduce overall bandwidth costs, CloudWays CDN offers Brotli compression and image polishing in addition to reducing website loading times.
I use CloudWays to host this website, as you are aware. The following represents the results of GtMetrix, Pingdom Tools, and Google PageSpeed for my website:
As you can see, Google PageSpeed Insights gave my test site a flawless score of 100/100 for both desktop and mobile devices. With a speed score of 96 out of 100, Pingdom awarded it an A. The GtMetrix test gave me a flawless 100% on both performance and site structure.
Also Read: Internal Linking And External Linking ?
CloudWays Pricing 2023
Pay-as-you-go managed WordPress hosting from CloudWays starts at $10 per month. It suggests that there is no upfront cost and that you can assess CloudWays hosting performance prior to making your monthly payment.
One GB of RAM, a single-core processor, 25GB of SSD storage, and 1TB of bandwidth are all included with a $10/month Digital Ocean server. For the majority of people and small business owners, it is adequate; I too use this server.
- Monthly Costs for the Digital Ocean Server: $14 to $1,035
- Monthly cost for Linode Server: $14 to $1,205
- Vultr Server: $13 to $385 per month.
- AWS Server: from $34.91 to $3,569 per month
- $1,290 per month to $33.30 per month for Google Cloud Platform
The resources you consume will influence the price of CloudWays. The company’s outstanding reputation is mostly due to the fact that it provides a range of plans to accommodate various website kinds, ranging from a basic WordPress blog to a huge app.
Compared to other cloud hosting companies, AWS and Google Cloud are significantly more expensive. In terms of cost, resources, and performance, Vultr aims to provide the best value for money. Vertical scalability is possible with CloudWays, so you can modify your server to match your unique needs.
As your website or application gains popularity, you may work your way up from the most basic option (Digital Ocean cloud server, 1 GB of RAM, 1 core processor) to the most advanced one.
Unlimited app installations, free SSL certificates, a dedicated firewall, round-the-clock server monitoring, and free migration are all included with every membership. PayPal and credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, and American Express) are accepted payment methods by CloudWays.
Benefits And Drawbacks Of CloudWays
There’s nothing perfect. The advantages and drawbacks of using CloudWays hosting, which I learned after using it for two years, are listed below.
Pros:
- Free Object Pro cache plugin; monthly cost: $95
- Outstanding value-for-money web hosting solution
- Pay-as-you-go financing method.
- 24/7/365 client assistance
- Leading-edge hosting security
- Intelligent self-healing server
- Dedicated Firewall for protecting websites
- Access to SFTP and SSH
- handled the whole hosting server.
- Migrating websites indefinitely using a WordPress plugin
- plenty of great comments
- Experiences with cloud hosting are made simpler with CloudWays.
- Update WordPress automatically
- To fully backup and restore, click
- Real-time server monitoring around the-clock
Cons:
- No CloudWays free email account (use Google Workspace instead)
- The absence of a CPanel could be considered a drawback by some.
- Getting a domain name registered is not necessary. You have to use a company like Namecheap or GoDaddy to register your domain.
I’m out of time for now. Please feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments section regarding CloudWays hosting. You can also share this article with friends who want to easily manage their websites with a better hosting platform.