Cloudways Review: Is its hosting really good?

In this Cloudwise review, we are going to dive deeper into the advantages and disadvantages of this cloud hosting provider.

Cloudways is a web hosting company founded in Malta, which has been in business since 2011. The company focuses on providing quality web hosting services to agencies, developers, and individuals at affordable prices for easy, fast, and convenient shared hosting.

Cloudwise Cloud-based hosting solutions concentrate on managed cloud hosting, managed WordPress hosting, and PHP app hosting (Drupal, Magento, Laravel, Prestashop, etc.). Cloudways doesn’t provide shared web hosting. Of course, a clear strong point of Cloudways next to a promising cloud hosting environment is its price. Starting at $10 / month, the company is cheaper than most cloudways options such as a2 hosting or WP engine.

In this Cloudways hosting review, based on your own managed-to-host needs, we will discuss its features and pricing to help you decide if it is the right choice for you.

Cloudways Web Hosting Features

Before discussing the features of Cloudway in detail. It is important to note that we conducted a practical test of their web hosting platform.

Since Cloudways offers a free trial, let’s create a test site/application. To do this, you only need your name and a valid email. Once your email is verified, you can create your own server.

The process is intuitive and very simple. I decided to follow the recommendations of Cloudways Bot and created a server with 2GB RAM, 50 GB SSD disk, and 1 core processor. It lets you choose the location of your server, so I chose New York.

When creating a new server, you can choose to automatically install an app like WordPress, Joomla, or Magento. For this review, I chose to install WordPress.

The server is created by clicking on the “Launch Now” button. It took less than 5 minutes for the server to be ready I was then able to access my new test site. I installed Astra WordPress Theme, but no caching plugin, because I wanted to test server speed.

Let’s see how fast the test site is. First, let’s take a look at what Google PageSpeed Insights says:

The 100 score is really nice for both mobile and desktop. Now, what about Pingdom?

The screenshots above clearly show that Cloudways is fast. Really fast, actually. While a test site that has no traffic cannot be compared to a real live site, it certainly provides a good overview of the speed and performance that you can expect from them which confirms Cloudways hosting reviews.

Ease of Use

Cloudways is easy to use, even for a non-tech-savvy customer. While testing Cloudways plans I was positively surprised at how the company makes it quick and easy for users to sign-up for a plan or their free trial.

As a client, creating your own dedicated server is easy and takes less than 10 minutes. You will need to 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 your user panel.

Cloudways supports installing 1-click applications for WordPress, WooCommerce, Joomla, etc. The same goes for CMS and PHP frameworks: Laravel, Symfony, and Cake PHP can all be set up in one click and in less than five minutes. Installing these applications and frameworks is not particularly difficult for developers, but saving time is always welcome.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the user panel of Cloudway is clean and you can easily find what you are looking for. The Customer instrument panel is split into 8 sections:

• Master Credentials: For all applications, your server has a dedicated IP address as well as details of SFTP and SSH access.
• Monitoring: This allows you to monitor your server’s resources and bandwidth usage.
• Manage Services: This section allows you to monitor services like Apache, MySQL, and Memcached.
• Settings & Packages: This allows you to choose your PHP version and define PHP settings.
• Security: Manage security settings and whitelist your IP and/or IP subnets for SSH / SFTP and MySQL connections.
• Vertical Scaling: This option allows you to increase or decrease the size of your server depending on how many resources you need.
• Backups: Schedule backups set backup frequencies, and perform an on-demand backup of your server.
• SMTP: Configure the SMTP service to line up outgoing email delivery on your server.

With Control Panel, Cloudway users can easily manage the most important aspects of their website/web application. Cloudy offers SSH and FTP access for more complex tasks that you want to run on your server.

On a less positive note, Cloudways does not offer CPanel access. Some users may find this an inconvenience because CPanel has become so widespread over the past two decades that there are plenty of hosting companies using it to offer users an easy way to manage their sites, applications, and domains.

Performance & Speed

As a cloud-based web hosting provider, Cloudway’s uptime is 99.99% and the loading speed is around 400-600 milliseconds. The main reason for this is that the company has partnered with Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, Voltaire, Linode, and AWS, which are the best cloud providers in the industry.

As mentioned above, I personally tested the server speed for this review. Google PageSpeed Insights gave my test site a 100/100 rating on both mobile and desktop, while Pingdom gave an A rating with a 96/100-speed score.

The following countries have Cloudway servers:

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Australia
• France
• Japan
• Germany
• Netherlands

For many of the countries listed above, it is also possible to select a city so that you can place your server geographically close to your visitors. In the United States, Cloudways has data centers in San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and Miami. Cloudwise vertical scaling allows you to scale your server according to the needs of your website/application. For example, if your application encounters a traffic spike, you can easily allocate more RAM to your server to handle the increase in popularity.

All of these features together allow Cloudway to deliver an outstanding performance and site speed. Their loading times are 40% to 50% better than those offered by shared web hosting, which confirms user reviews.

Cloudways CDN

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers and data centers that are geographically located on the main server of some web content and the user requests it. The goal of a CDN is to deliver content quickly by reducing latency.

Using a dedicated CDN accelerates your website/application and provides your visitors with a far better user experience. Cloudways CDN starts at less than $1 per 25GB.

Improved Security

Cloudways takes security seriously, which is a strong point. The company offers free managed backups that allow you to restore your site to its previous date. The process is extremely fast and easy. Backups are an important part of website security: no matter what, you always have a new copy of your entire site (files and databases) that can be restored within minutes.

Cloudways offers a free Let’s Encrypt SSL Certificate. An SSL certificate adds an extra layer of security to your website or application, using the HTTPS protocol instead of the classic HTTP protocol. SSL Certificate is a must-have feature for any website. First, since the use of SSL is now widespread, not using SSL / HTTPS will make your site look less trustworthy and more serious than your competitors. Second, Google confirms that websites using SSL certificates are improving their rankings.

To enhance the security of the account, Cloudways to Factor Authentication (TFA) has been added as a secondary layer of security to ensure that only you can log in to your Cloudways account.

Free Website Migration

The good news for website owners who already have their website hosted by another provider: Cloudways offers website migration, which means you don’t have to go through the long and sometimes painful process of moving your site to your new host.

Cloudways website migration is completely free, whichever plan you choose. For those who use WordPress, the company has created its own WordPress plugin that ensures a smooth and hassle-free migration, which points to many reviews of Cloudway Hosting.

Managed WordPress Hosting

Managed WordPress Hosting is a service where the technical aspects of WordPress are managed by a web hosting company to provide a hassle-free experience to the customer. These include WordPress updates, application speeds, security, uptime, backups, and more.

Cloudways offer includes managed WordPress hosting services. Which is sweet news for little to medium-sized businesses, high-traffic blogs, and e-commerce companies.

Free Trial

The most effective way to ensure that it fits your needs is to try a service yourself. Cloudways understands this and offers a free 3-day trial. So you can review everything by yourself before you buy. Setting up your free trial is quick and easy. Go to the Cloudways homepage and click the Start Free button at the top right of the screen. You must provide your name and a legitimate email address. No payment information is required.

The duration of the free trial is 3 days, which is sufficient to accurately test the features, speed, and ease of use of Cloudways. During the trial period, you may choose to upgrade to a paid offer and move your existing site to Cloudways.

24/7 Support

For this review, I decided to reach out to Cloudway’s pre-sale support using Live Chat. On Saturday evening, I could not get in touch with an agent but help was offered from Cloudways Bot. Although the bot couldn’t answer some of the technical questions I had, it did a great job of guiding me to find the best plan that suited my website’s needs and suggested that I contact an agent on the phone at a later date.

After signing up for the free trial of Cloudways, I contacted customer support and asked a few questions. After the bot failed to answer my question, I was transferred to a support agent who gave me the help I needed.

Cloudways customer support can be reached via live chat, email, or phone.

Cloudways Pricing

One of the strong points of Cloudway is its price, which is cheaper than its competitors. Cloudways entry fee is $ 10 per month. Cloudway prices depend on the resources you need. And the company offers a variety of plans to fit all types of websites, from a simple WordPress blog to a large app, which is one of the reasons for its amazing reviews.

As with other major shared hosting companies. Cloudwise accepts payments from credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, and American Express) as well as PayPal.

Cloudways offers 5 different cloud service providers that you can choose from.

• DigitalOcean – From $10/month
• Linode – From $12/month
• Vultr – From $11/month
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) – From $34.91/month
• Google Cloud Platform – Starting at $33.30/month

Since Cloudways provides vertical scaling. You can configure your server to suit your needs. If you need a website or application due to the increase in traffic. It is possible to start and upgrade with the smallest plan (digital ocean cloud server, 1 GB RAM, 1 core processor).

Comes with all plans: 24/7 expert support, unlimited app installation, free SSL certificate, and free migration.

Cloudways Discount

The great news is you can try out their service up to 3 months for free with our exclusive Cloudways discount link.

Cloudways Review Conclusion

I was very positively surprised by Cloudways and its cloud hosting plans. Setup is quick and easy, even for people with limited knowledge of managed cloud hosting services. Server speed too fast, Google PageSpeed Insights rated my test site 100 and Pingdom gave it 96.

On top of that, Cloudways prices are very affordable. Plans start at $10 / month. A website like cloud hosting CatsWhoCode costs $22 a month, much less than the average.

A free trial of Cloudway is the best way to ensure that their service meets the requirements of your site/application. If you sign up for a free trial, you can easily upgrade. Become a subscriber and see for yourself all the amazing reviews.

Cloudways Pros and Cons

Conclusion

Still, having some confusion? Or need any kind of help with website building? Then, please comment below. We’ll be happy to help you.

We hope this article helped you know about “Cloudways hosting”. If you like this article, then please share it with your friends and colleagues.

You may also like our article on Hostgator hosting review and Hostinger hosting review.

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