If you have decided to buy Cloudways cloud server hosting, I would say you made a smart choice to perform well in search results.
I wrote a full article on WordPress speed optimization, and if you read this article you will find that a lot of the speed task is done by a team of experts, and so you get a fast loading site which is good SEO.
Excellent server response times, no downtime, Premium support, pay-per-use plans, auto-migration, affordable CDN are some of the strengths of this high performance managed hosting.
Cloudways offers different plans for every cloud server provider!
- Digital Ocean Starter Plan – $ 10 / Month (RAM – 1GB, Bandwidth – 1TB, Storage – 25GB)
- Linode Starter Plan – $ 12 / Month (RAM – 1GB, Bandwidth – 1TB, Storage – 25GB)
- VULTR Starter Plan – $ 11 / Month (RAM – 1GB, Bandwidth – 1TB, Storage – 25GB)
- Amazon Web Services Starter Plan – $ 36.51 (1.75GB RAM, 2TB bandwidth, 20GB storage)
- Google Cloud Starter Plan – $ 33.30 (RAM – 1.7GB, Bandwidth – 2TB, Storage – 20GB)
All plans include unlimited app installs, dedicated firewalls, built-in CDN, regular security patches, and many other great features.
If you’re on a tight budget, I suggest you upgrade to Basic DO thanks to the seasonal downsizing of just $ 10 per month. We use the same plan for this blog,What do you think of this managed cloud hosting and its free Black Friday offers? Share your opinion in the comments section.
Cloudways Web Hosting Features
Before discussing Cloudways’ features in detail, we must note that we did some actual testing of their web hosting platform.
Since Cloudways offers a free trial, let’s create a test site/app. To do this, you only need your name and a valid email address. After confirming your email address, you can create your server.
The process is very intuitive and straightforward. I decided to follow Cloudways Bot’s recommendations and built a server with 2GB RAM, 50GB SSD, and a 1-core processor. This allows you to choose the location of your server, which is why I chose New York.
When creating a new server, you can choose to automatically install an application like WordPress, Joomla, or Magento. For this review, I decided to install WordPress.
Ease of use
Cloudways is easy to use, even for non-tech-savvy customers. When testing Cloudways’ plans, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly and easily the company made it easy for users to sign up for a plan or free trial.
Setting up your dedicated server for a client is easy and takes less than 10 minutes. Just select the number of resources you need and the location of your server. If you need to install a specific application on your web hosting plan, you can do so with just a few clicks from the user panel.
Cloudways supports one-click application installation for WordPress, WooCommerce, Joomla, and more. The same is true for CMS and PHP frameworks: Laravel, Symfony, and Cake PHP can be deployed with one click and in less than five minutes. Installing these apps and frameworks is not difficult for a developer, but time savings are always welcome.
Cloudways’ user dashboard is clean, and you can easily find what you are looking for. The client control panel is divided into eight sections:
- Basic Credentials: This contains the IP address assigned to your server, as well as SFTP and SSH access information for all applications.
- Monitoring: This allows you to monitor server resources and bandwidth usage.
- Service Management: This section allows you to control services such as Apache, MySQL, and Memcached.
- Settings and Packages: This allows you to select the PHP version and define PHP settings.
- Security: manage security settings, whitelist IP addresses and / or IP subnets for SSH / SFTP and MySQL connections.
- Scale-up: This option allows you to increase or decrease the size of the server based on the number of resources required.
- Backup. Schedule backup times, select a backup frequency, and back up to your server on demand.
- SMTP: Configure the SMTP service to configure the delivery of outgoing emails to your server.
Using the dashboard, Cloudways users can easily manage the most critical aspects of their website/web application. It also provides SSH and FTP access for more advanced tasks that you might want to do on your server.
On the other hand, The hosting does not offer CPanel access. Some users may consider this a disadvantage as CPanel has been very popular over the past two decades. Many hosting companies have used it to provide users with an easy way to manage their website, application, and domain.
Performance and Speed
As a cloud web hosting provider, Cloudways has 99.99% uptime and download speeds of around 400-600ms. The main reason for this is that the company has partnered with Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, Vultr, Linode, and AWS, some of the best cloud providers in the industry.
As mentioned above, I tested the server speed for this review. Google PageSpeed Insights gave my test site a 100/100 rating for both mobile and desktop, while Pingdom gave it an A with a 96/100-speed rating.
Cloudways has servers in the following countries:
- USA
- United Kingdom
- Australia
- France
- Japan
- Germany
- Holland
For many of the countries listed above, it is also possible to select a city so that you can geographically bring your server closer to your visitors. In the US, Cloudways has data centers in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Newark, Atlanta, and Miami.
Scaling up Cloudways allows you to scale your server according to the needs of your website/application. For example, if your application is experiencing high traffic, you can efficiently allocate more RAM to your server to keep up with the growing popularity.
All of these features together enable Cloudways to deliver superior site performance and speed. Their load times are 40-50% better than shared web hosting, as evidenced by user reviews.
Cloudways CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of servers and data centers geographically located between the origin server of some web content and the user requesting it. The goal of a CDN is to deliver content faster by reducing latency.
Using a custom CDN makes your website/app faster and provides a better user experience for your visitors. CDN Cloudways starts at $ 1 for 25GB.
Enhanced security
Cloudways takes security very seriously, which is a strong point. The company offers free managed backups that let you restore your site to the way it used to be. The process is speedy and easy. Backups are a vital part of website security: no matter what happens, you always have a fresh copy of your entire website (files and database) that can be restored in minutes.
Cloudways also offers free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates. An SSL certificate adds an extra layer of security to your website or application that will use HTTPS instead of classic HTTP.
SSL certificates are an indispensable feature of any website. Firstly, since SSL is widely used nowadays, dropping SSL / HTTPS will make your site less reliable and more severe than your competitors. Secondly, Google has confirmed that websites using SSL certificates are getting higher rankings.
Cloudways has added two-factor authentication (TFA) as a secondary layer of protection to ensure that only you can log into your Cloudways account to enhance account security.
Free site migration
Great news for website owners whose website is hosted by another service provider: Cloudways offers a website transfer service, which means you don’t have to go through the lengthy and sometimes painful process of migrating your website to a new host.
Cloudways website migration is entirely free, whichever plan you choose. The company has developed its WordPress plugin that provides a smooth and hassle-free migration for those using WordPress, as indicated by many Cloudways hosting reviews.
Managed WordPress Hosting
Managed WordPress Hosting is a service where the web hosting company manages the technical aspects of WordPress to provide the customer with a hassle-free experience. It includes WordPress updates, app speed, security, uptime, backups, etc.
It offering includes managed WordPress hosting services, which is good news for SMBs, high-traffic blogs, and e-commerce businesses.
Free trial
Trying a service yourself is the most effective way to make sure it suits your needs. Cloudways understands this and offers a 3-day free trial, so you can check everything before you buy.
Installing a free trial is quick and easy: go to the Cloudways homepage and click the Get Started Free button in the top right corner of the screen. You will need to provide your name and a valid email address. No billing information is required.
The free trial period is three days long enough to properly test the features, speed, and ease of use of Cloudways. You can upgrade to a paid offering during the trial period and transfer your current location to Cloudways.
24/7 support
For this review, I decided to contact Cloudways pre-sales support via live chat. I was unable to reach an agent on Saturday night, but Cloudways Bot helped me. While the bot could not answer some of my technical questions, it helped me find the best plan for my website and suggested calling the agent later on the phone.
After signing up for a Cloudways free trial, I reached out to customer support and asked a few questions. After the bot did not respond to my requests, I was taken to a support agent who provided me with the assistance I needed.
Cloudways support can be contacted via live chat, email, or phone.
Cloudways Pricing
One of the strengths of Cloudways is their price, which is cheaper than the competition. The cost of entering Cloudways is $ 10 per month. Cloudways’ pricing depends on the resources you need, and the company offers a variety of plans for all types of websites, from a simple WordPress blog to a large app, which is one of the many reasons for its excellent reviews.
Like other major shared hosting companies, Cloudways accepts credit card payments (Visa, MasterCard, and American Express) in addition to PayPal.
Cloudways offers five different cloud service providers from which you can choose.
- DigitalOcean – from $ 10 per month
- Linode – from $ 12 per month
- Vultr – from $ 11 per month
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) – From $ 34.91 per month
- Google Cloud Platform – from $ 33.30 / month
Because Cloudways scales vertically, you can customize your server to suit your needs. You can start with the minor plan (DigitalOcean Cloud Server, 1GB RAM, 1 Core) and upgrade when your website or app needs it due to increased traffic.
All plans include 24/7 expert support, unlimited app installs, free SSL certificates, and free migrations.
Cloudways free trial is the best way to make sure their services meet your site/application needs. If you sign up for a free trial, you can easily upgrade to the new version, become a customer and see for yourself what all these fabulous reviews are about.
Pros
- Excellent value for money. Even the starting price offers high-quality web hosting plans.
- Free trial and free site migration. Cloudways make migration quick and easy.
- Lots of positive reviews
Cons
- It can be expensive depending on the hosting platform provider.
- There is no control panel – it may seem like a flaw to some
- No domain registration. You will need to get your domain from a registrar such as Namecheap or GoDaddy.
Conclusion
The Hosting offers high-performance web hosting at a much more affordable price than most web hosts.
If you are thinking about upgrading your hosting, try Cloudways.
What matters is what you think is essential. And Cloudways is one of the few web hosts offering a free trial, so give them a try and see what you think.
