Cloudways Hosting Review

CURRENT PRICING: $10.00*

Cloudways hosting provides user-friendly fast performance and secure transmission cloud hosting. It is one of the best completely scalable hosting among the hosting sources I have tested on a cloud server. It’s fast and reliable hosting makes it one of my recommended hosting providers to give a try.

Ease of Use

4.9/5

Cloudways has it’s own user panel. With which anyone can understand and manage in few days.

Price and Value

4.9/5

The best cloud managed server as low as $10 is very affordable for what they offering.

Support

4.9/5

Cloudways Support team is very friendly and relies in minutes. And they are available 24×7.

Cloudways Hosting Review:

If you are looking for best Managed Cloud Hosting to start with then I must say Cloudways is the right choice. Cloudways provides high performance with affordable managed plans. If you check 80% plus people gave 5 star rating to Cloudways. 

I know you have many questions in your mind like:

  • what is Cloudways? 
  • Is it any good? 
  • will it give you the flexibility to scale? 
  • How is the performance and speed of Cloudways?
  • Which plan is best suits for me? 

may be the list is more. In this detailed Cloudways Hosting Review you will find all the answers.

Let’s dive deep and get started!

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Pros and Cons:

The Ultimate Managed Hosting Platform

what is Cloudways?

The Cloudways web hosting company was founded in the year 2011. It was founded by Pere  Aaqib Gaditm, Uzair Gadit and Umair Gadit. The head office is located in Malta, with two additional offices based in UAE and Spain.

The main motto of Cloudways is to provide cloud hosting with ease and convenience. Cloudways not only manages your cloud hosting account, but also provides you with various tips from of industry leaders on website development.

General Hosting Overview

While I tested a few web hosting services, I found few differences in Cloudways. Unlike most other web hosting services, Cloudways made my easy bit easy. By it I built a website without spending much money.

It lets you select from one of the five platforms, including Google cloud platform and Amazon Web Services. 

One of the best things I liked even more is, its wallet-friendly pay-as-you-go plans. It lets you sign up for a trial run. So that it made me test  without taking my credit card out. 

It also provides the customers with a single click solution to launch the web application. We can do it on insanely fast cloud services. As an added benefit, a caching plugin that is absolutely free is integrated on the host. And this automatically clears the cache on a specific period of time.

Cloudways VS Traditional Hosting

Now I think you already know that Cloud hosting is different from traditional hosting. 

In short, rather than hosting your website on a single server, Cloudways could spread across different servers in different locations. 

of course, these all are connected via the Internet. In this, you will use a “virtual machine”. And it will help you to access the different servers across the “cloud”. And to manage your website. This feature makes Cloud Hosting much faster than the Traditional Hosting. 

The Cloud hosting of cloudways is a relatively new kind of hosting. But it evolved into the most  popular one as it has several benefits over traditional hosting. 

Here are few benefits of cloud hosting compared to traditional hosting:

Scalability – The traffic of your website can fluctuate up and down.  And at this point you would most likely find shared hosting resources were overused. 

And also dedicated hosting resources were under-used. To overcome this, cloud hosting could  scale up or down as required. It can be done just by tapping into the resources of more virtual machines in the cloud. 

Some of the hosts provide auto-scaling. This option is available when the extra traffic kicks in. So you don’t need to worry while the traffic gets up or down.

Reliability – Compared to the traditional hosting, Cloudways cloud hosting provides better reliability. 

As your website is spread across several interconnected servers that are all storing the same information. It’s no issue if one server goes offline. Because the others will fill the gap. And your website remains online every time.

Flexibility – Differing from traditional hosting, in cloud hosting, you can only pay for the server resources you use. So in case traffic goes up, your host scales up resources. And you pay for the extra. But when traffic goes down, then your host scales down resources. And you pay less.

As you only pay for what you use, this Cloud hosting could be a bit more expensive than shared hosting. But is more affordable than dedicated hosting. Its prices generally start from $10 per month.

But Cloudways provides you plans with dedicated resources allotted to you and collect a regular agreed fee every month, while signing with it.

Now let me describe a few more features that made me choose Cloudways compared to traditional hosting providers.

Now let me discuss with you the top 10 pros of SiteGround hosting. I feel these 10 things made it more beneficial.

Key Features of CloudWays that makes it as a Best Affordable Cloud Managed Host

Cloudways Hosting Review - Welcome

1. Choose From 5 Top Cloud Providers

Cloudways Hosting Review - Simplicity

In Cloudways, before you start to configure your server, you should choose your preferred cloud provider. This can be done on the Cloudways console. The cloud provider is another company that provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service to Cloudways.

Cloudways generally works with five cloud providers:

  • Digital Ocean
  • Linode
  • Vultr
  • Google Compute Engine
  • Amazon Web Services
Cloudways Hosting Review - 5 Providers

2. Custom Control Panel - CloudWays has its own Control Panel

After you sign up in Cloudways hosting you will be redirected to Its own Control Panel. 

Here you could manage your server(s) and applications. 

It is unlike the typical cPanel we find in other hosts. 

Best of all, Cloudways’ custom control panel is intuitive. And it is also modern by itself. By this panel’s menu, you could access Servers, Applications, Teams, and Projects..etc all at one place.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-own-UI

3. Configuring Server is Easy - Server Management

After you finish setting up an application, you could now work on running the website’s usual aspects that are under Servers.

You could check your login credentials under Server Management.

There will be a page for monitoring CPU usage. It is very vital as consistently high usages can affect your website’s performance. With this you can scale your server if needed.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-Server-Management

All the server services that are running are listed in Manage Services. There you can stop or start, and restart one or many services at any time.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-Manage-Services

You can configure MySQL and PHP version including its settings. And also other server-level settings can be seen under Settings and Packages tab

In the Security tab, you could block certain IP addresses. You can block them from gaining access to your resources.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-Security

Backups will be done daily by default. However, if you want you can change the schedule.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-Backup

Finally, you will also have an SMTP option for setting up outbound emails from your server.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-SMTP

4. Application Management

Cloudways’ Application Management will allow you  to manage application queries. You can manage all the applications hosted on one server however you want on your web server.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-Application-Management

5. Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate Management

SSL certification offers secure transmission of data. By this, you can transfer your data, to and from your website without any risk.

Cloudways has enabled the free SSL provider. It offers Let’s Encrypt SSL Certification. By this, you can switch between a custom SSL certificate of your choice or using the pre-default SSL Certification available at Cloudways. 

 You can also use the custom SSL tool on the platform. By it, you can install and configure your free SSL certificates.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-SSL

6. It Has Team Management

Cloudways hosting has a great feature that its great collaboration feature – Team Management. 

It provides you a path to add team members. And also assign them full or limited access to your website.

So irrespective of geo-location anyone can work simultaneously in one project to achieve the desired goal.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-Team-Management

7. CloudWays provides Staging & Cloning

CloudWays provides both Staging and Cloning.

But if you are new to these two things, let me help you out.

a) What is Staging?

Staging is also an application and exact clone of the original live version of it. It consists all the same exact files. 

Staging is mainly used for testing the changes before you make them permanent or live on your website. 

This staging feature is in Cloudways vert handy. Just deploy a staging area. 

You should not do the testing on the live site never. If anything goes wrong then it is very difficult to manage. Trust me I have been there.

So before going to live you can check that everything is good and Perform all the tests then move the changes to live. That’s what staging. 

So that by staging, you won’t need to worry about introducing harmful changes. Mainly the changes that you can’t reverse.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-Staging

b) What is Cloning?

Cloning is mostly the same as staging. But you could make several clone sites while you’re changing to new servers. And also while you are showcasing your website to clients, if you’re a freelancer.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-Cloning

8. CloudWays known for its Advanced Caching

Cloudways generally consists of  server infrastructure from five cloud providers:

  • Digital Ocean
  • Linode
  • Vultr
  • Google Compute Engine
  • Amazon Web Services
Cloudways Hosting Review - Caching

All the five providers are known to provide SSD-based VPS. And also dedicated servers, that ensure fast server performance.

Other than cloud infrastructure infrastructure, this hosting also takes help of several caching mechanisms to optimize servers. 

Cloudways uses an in-house caching plug-in. And it is called Breeze. It is very easy to set up, and use. It also supports Cloudways own content delivery network that adds more speed and reliability. 

It allows your webpage to have more speed by caching your web pages on different servers located across the world. 

Cloudways Hosting Review - Breeze

9. Scalable - Vertical Scaling

While I thought of upgrading my server, I found an interesting feature in Cloudways. You can upgrade your server resources in just a few clicks through its Vertical Scaling. This feature can be found as an option under Server Management.

Cloudways Scaling works in both ways. It is really a good thing. You can downgrade, when you need to revert to your previous  plan.

The good thing is that you do not need to change anything except the scaling options and it doesn’t effect your live website and their is no chance mis-conception.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review---Vertical-Scaling

10. You can Monitor the Server and Its performance

One of the performance feature you can find in Cloudways hosting is its  Monitoring option under Server Management.

This feature will let you monitor your server’s performance. You can check it at a glance. And can provide insights when it’s good time to scale up.

11. It Can Handle Traffic Surges with Ease

Have you ever experienced getting a crush of traffic and then having your site go down? 

This can happen to us when our website can’t handle more number of visitors coming in at once. 

But with Cloudways vertical scaling, you can adjust allocated server resources. You can make the scaling at any time with a few clicks. It is an excellent feature when experiencing a traffic surge.

12. 24x7 Live Chat Support

Cloudways customers can get support through their live Chat or by submitting report tickets. I tried their live chat. And it’s quite fast and informative. Best of all, their customer support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

At an additional cost, you can get Premium customer support. Premium customers will get priority resolution on issues. Along with regular support channels, premium members can get phone support. They can also use a private Slack channel. And can request application support and server customization.

Their new feature CloudwaysBot is your very own personal server assistant. It helps you to optimize your server and application settings. It is  designed to keep track of your server. It also tracks applications sending any notifications about billings, security, settings and upgrades.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-live-chat

13. Best Managed Hosting with 100% Uptime

Website uptime is the most important thing of a hosting service. If your site is down, then your customers/users are unable to find you or access your products or services. As a result, they might not come back. So while trying a hosting, I first test it’s uptime. To my notice, Cloudways offers good uptime.

I tracked my Cloudways-hosted test site’s uptime. I collected data for the most recent 30 days. And I found Cloudways to be very stable. In fact, it didn’t go down even once.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-Uptime

14. Free Site Migration with any plan

You can get One free site migration with any plan of Cloudways. Cloudways comes with a built-in tool for Migrating WordPress websites to its hosting platform. It is called the WordPress Migrator.

You can find it in the Application Management Tab. And you can use it to migrate data from your WordPress Dashboard to the one you have launched.

Just give your website to experts and they do the rest. And even they give you suggestions to the configurations depending on the app you holding. 

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-Migration

15. Free Trial For 3 Days

You can opt for a 3 days free trial if you want test their servers. In my opinion they should have gave a week at least. 

Cloudways Hosting Review - 3 days trial

Cons of SiteGround

1. No Domain Registration

Cloudways do not provide domain name registration service at all. So before you sign up to use their hosting services, you have to buy a domain name through a third-party seller.

As I said earlier, NameCheap will provide you cheap rates on new domains. Next you can change the name servers to Cloudways. Hola! Done.

2. Email Service is not included with Hosting

Any of the Cloudways plans do not come with integrated email accounts. Instead, they ask you to pay per email account. This could be the biggest limitation of Cloudways. 

As paying per email account can be expensive if you run a large business. And if you need plenty of email accounts to keep things running. Cloudways email services as a separate paid add-on.

3. No Plesk or cPanel, as they provide their own console

Unfortunately, you cannot find any Plesk or cPanel to use in Cloudways. It is a Platform-as-a-Service company. So they provide their own console only. And you have to go with it to help you manage applications hosted on cloud servers.

Cloudways Plans and Features

One of Cloudways’ major plus points is their pricing. They are cheaper than the competitors. Cloudways’ entry price is just $10 per month. 

This hosting platform price mainly depends on the resources you need. 

As an advantage, Cloudways hosting offers various plans to fit all kinds of websites and applications. Right from a simple WordPress blog to a big app, it is ideal for all.

As discussed earlier Cloudways consists of 5 different cloud server providers which you can choose from. Let’s see their pricing.

DigitalOcean Price ranges from $10/month to $80/month.

It provides 1GB to 8GB RAM. Processors from 1 core to 4 core. Storage from 25GB to 160GB. And bandwidth from 1TB to 5TB.

Linode Price ranged from $12/month to $90/month.

It provides 1GB to 8GB RAM. Processors from 1 core to 4 core. Storage from 20GB to 96GB. And bandwidth from 1TB to 4TB.

Vultr Price ranges from $11/month to $84/month.

It provides 1GB to 8GB RAM. Processors from 1 core to 4 core. Storage from 25GB to 100GB. And bandwidth from 1TB to 4TB.

Google Cloud Platform – Price ranges from $73.62/month to $226.05/month.

It provides RAM from 3.75GB-16GB. vCPU from 1-4. Storage at 20GB across the board. Bandwidth 2GB across the board.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) – Price ranges from $85.17/month to $272.73/month.

It provides RAM from 3.75GB-15GB. vCPU from 1-4. Storage at 4GB across the board. And bandwidth 2GB across the board.

As Cloudways offer vertical scaling, you  could configure your server to fit your needs. You can start with the smallest plan such as DigitalOcean cloud server. It provides  1GB RAM and one Core processor. Later you can upgrade to a costly one when your website or application needs it due to traffic increase.

All plans come with:

  • Free migration
  • Free SSL certificates
  • 24/7 expert support and 
  • Unlimited app installation

Security and Backups

They provide best Customer data security. They consist of a very resilient backup system. It is based on off-site or incremental backups of all applications of their customers, to an external storage network. They charge $0.033 per GB of backup storage.

CloudWays Data Centers

Based on which cloud provider you choose, you can host your site’s data on data centers. Their data centers are located in the USA, Asia, Europe, South America and many more. They have 62 data centers located in 15 countries and 33 cities.

Cloudways-Hosting-Review-Servers

Help and Support

If you ever need help, you can get in touch with their best customer support. You can talk to their  customer team via live chat, or can submit a ticket through the ticketing system. You can also request a call and can speak to customer support via phone.

They also provide articles and guides about Getting Started, application management and Server Management.

Frequetly Asked Questions - SiteGround Hosting

Final Verdict

Cloudways hosting provides user-friendly fast performance and secure transmission cloud hosting. 

It is one of the best completely scalable hosting among the hosting sources I have tested on a cloud server. 

It’s fast and reliable hosting makes it one of my recommended hosting providers to give a try.

If you have any other mentions do let me know.

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Cloudways

overall Uptime
100%

Server Performance
A+

Ease of Use - 4.9/5

Price & Value - 4.9/5

Support - 4.9/5

Overall Score
4.9/5

5/5

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$10*

monthly

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*100% Uptime

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