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Cloudways Review
Cloudways Review
June 07, 2022 / Richard Sutherland
Cloudways Review
June 07, 2022 / Richard Sutherland
Flexible cloud hosting plans
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At A Glance

A managed cloud hosting service you can use with five of the biggest cloud platforms available today, Cloudways is a well-priced, high-performance choice that makes getting your website up and running on the cloud effortless. With user-friendly setup wizards and outstanding technical support options, Cloudways makes cloud hosting accessible for any company, big or small.

Bandwidth: 2GB-12TB

Free marketing offer: Three-day trial

Uptime: 99.99-100%

Website builder: No

Money-back guarantee: No

Price per month: From $10

Pros

  • Works with five cloud infrastructure providers
  • Fast installation process
  • Three-day free trial
  • Easy provider migration
  • 24/7/365 support

Cons

  • Few bundled applications
  • Requires third-party domain setup

Overview

With Cloudways, you can host your web application on any of five of the biggest cloud platforms available today. The managed cloud hosting service makes deploying your website to any of these platforms extremely simple, as Cloudways handles the vast majority of the server maintenance tasks for you.

Cloudways is a compelling choice if your company wants the scalability, economy, speed, and future-proofing that cloud hosting provides without the difficulty of installing and maintaining such a system yourself. And with a three-day free trial, there’s no downside to testing out the advantages of cloud hosting.

Best Suited For

Cloudways is suitable for anyone who is looking for the power and scalability of cloud providers, yet might be intimidated by their complexity. Managed cloud hosting from Cloudways means most of the work of setting up your cloud-hosted site is performed for you. The company handles day-to-day maintenance tasks such as security updates and can even help you troubleshoot any issues you have with your website.

Hosting Types

Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting provider, meaning the company handles most of the work of setting up and administering your website or web application on the cloud.

Cloudways isn’t tied to one cloud hosting provider. When you choose Cloudways, your web application can be hosted on one of five of the largest cloud data center providers available today. You can choose between DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud.

Hosting Features

Cloudways has over 60 global data centers across five cloud providers. Its most important feature is the one-click installation of its optimized stack, meaning that with just a click of a button everything you need to run a website on the cloud is installed for you. And because they’ll be hosted on the cloud, your websites will perform very well and have no problems scaling to high levels of traffic.

The hosting provider also offers wizards for specific applications like WordPress, Magento, Drupal, and Joomla, so you can have these applications up and running in a matter of minutes.

Cloudways plans all have dedicated firewalls, automated backups, free SSL, and regular security patching. With support for unlimited applications and one-click server cloning, Cloudways is an easy way to take advantage of the power of cloud hosting.

Plans & Pricing

Cloudways has over 60 pay-as-you-go plans spread out across the five infrastructure providers you can choose from. You can choose to pay hourly or monthly.

Each of the plans includes a different amount of RAM, number of processors, hard drive storage, and bandwidth. It’s easy to upgrade and downgrade between plans, and you can even transfer between the different cloud infrastructure providers.

Overall, Cloudways has very impressive pricing. Managed cloud hosting with DigitalOcean starts at just $10/month, with more expensive plans rising to $225.93/month. All plans include free migration, unlimited application installations, automated backups, and support for the Cloudflare global content delivery platform.

Infrastructure provider

Lowestcost plan

RAM

Processors

DigitalOcean

$10/month

1GB

1

Linode

$12/month

1GB

1

Vultr

$13/month

1GB

1

AWS

$36.51/month

2GB

2

Google Cloud

$33.18/month

1.70GB

1

Infrastructure provider

Storage

Bandwidth

DigitalOcean

25GB

1TB

Linode

25GB

1TB

Vultr

32GB

1TB

AWS

20GB

2TB

Google Cloud

20GB

2TB

Free Offerings

Cloudways has a three-day free trial. You don’t need to hand over your credit card details when using the trial, but you do need to verify your email address and phone number.

This free trial offer is a relatively unique way to try out specific providers. If you’re not happy with a provider, you can use the Cloudways migration feature to transfer to a different one.

Uptime and Performance

The optimized nature of Cloudways’ software, paired with the huge scale of the cloud platforms it uses, allows your web applications to serve significantly more concurrent visitors without a drop in performance. In Cloudways’ own testing, the average response time for a small business website was over two times faster than a leading managed WordPress hosting provider.

Cloudways has a stated uptime of 99.99%, which is extremely high, so your website should rarely, if ever, be offline. The exact service level agreement you get with Cloudways depends on the underlying infrastructure provider you choose. DigitalOcean, for example, has a 99.99% uptime guarantee, whereas Vultr has a 100% uptime guarantee.

All Cloudways plans include regular security patching and free SSL, so your websites should be safer from hackers, and data transmitted to and from your visitors will be encrypted.

Technology

The power of Cloudways comes down to what it calls its Thunderstack—the set of optimized software that your website is built on that allows it to run at blistering speeds. The most important elements in use are NGINX, Apache, Memcached, MySQL, Varnish Cache, PHP-FPM, Redis, and PHP 8.

This may seem like a list of buzzwords, but these software tools work exceptionally well together to deliver site performance that’s up to 10 times faster than traditional shared hosting. And, of course, because you’re hosting your website on the cloud, it means this high performance is almost infinitely scalable, so you’ll never run into speed or storage issues, even if your online business explodes in popularity.

Ease of Use

Using Cloudways is arguably one of the easiest ways to deploy and manage a cloud-based web application. The administration panel includes step-by-step wizards for creating a server, adding staging, installing SSL, managing caching, and maintenance tasks like backing up servers.

You can clone a fully-configured server, migrate a WordPress website, or add additional websites to the same server, all with these simple wizards. You can even change data centers and cloud infrastructure providers at the click of a button.

Support Services

Cloudways support is offered 24/7/265 by live chat. More complex issues can be handled via online ticketing. By default, you’re guaranteed a response to your online ticket within three hours, but an Advanced Support option (from $100 per month) cuts this to 30 minutes.

A Premium Support option (from $500 per month) takes things even further, with everything from plugin troubleshooting and database optimization to server error investigation and proactive server monitoring. With Premium support, you get a dedicated account manager, 24-hour phone support, and a private slack channel.

In Conclusion

There are few better ways to take advantage of the speed, power, and scalability of cloud hosting platforms than managed cloud hosting, and Cloudways is arguably the best managed cloud host available today.

With its intuitive interface, one-click installers, and server migration service, it’s easy to get your website up and running. And with Cloudways’ hands-on technical support, managed security, and 24/7 real-time monitoring, managing a website hosted on the cloud has never been easier.

Get started now, visit Cloudways
By Richard Sutherland
Richard brings over 20 years of website development, SEO, and marketing to the table. A graduate in Computer Science, Richard has lectured in Java programming and has built software for companies including Samsung and ASDA. He writes regularly for the likes of TechRadar, PC Gamer, Creative Bloq.