Cloudways Hosting Review 2023 – Absolutely A Detailed Review After 2 Years Usage

Trying to find a Cloudways Hosting review that has all the important information you’re looking for? Or are you on the verge of choosing a hosting service but you can’t decide which path to go to?

Don’t worry, in this guide, not only will we be giving you the basics of hosting services – we will be direct and straightforward in discussing this particular platform! After using this particular service for 2 years, I’m pretty sure that we’ll be covering all the nooks and crannies of Cloudways Hosting for you to be aided in deciding whether it’s a good fit for you or not.

What is Cloudways Hosting?

Let’s not over complicate it – Cloudways is a managed hosting platform that’s end goal is to provide webmasters and website owners affordable, yet highly reliable hosting services. The company is overall reliable, garnering a total of 280+ employees in many different countries worldwide, ready and prepared to serve and support you.

Cloudways takes pride on their cutting-edge and state-of-the-art technology without premium rates and prices attached to them.

The company was founded in 2012 and since then, they have been this intuitive, one-of-a-kind, cloud hosting platform that caters to the needs of consumers, small businesses, and even some corporations globally.

What is Managed Hosting?

In the world of hosting, there is what we call managed hosting and unmanaged hosting. Unmanaged hosting gives users and clients the power to have total control over their website – from optimization, security, even in maintenance and updating.

Managed hosting, on the contrary, is the exact opposite. In the easiest and simplest terms, it is an IT provisioning model given by service providers that allows customers and clients to rent or lease dedicated servers and hardware. Unlike unmanaged hosting, managed hosting won’t give you full and total control of your website, and instead, will have limited power.

On the brighter side, the owner wouldn’t also be fully responsible for the updates and security, as it will be provisioned by the hosting platform.

So, Cloudways hosting is a type of managed hosting, perfect for beginners and those who have little-to-no knowledge about servers, hardware, and all those good stuff.

Pros and Cons of Cloudways Hosting

Like any other product or service, there are several things where Cloudways hosting excels in, and on the flip side, you’ll find some that needs improvement. So, just a quick up, here are the pros and cons or the advantages and drawbacks to using Cloudways Hosting.

the advantages and drawbacks to using Cloudways Hosting.

Pros of Cloudways Hosting	Cons of Cloudways Hosting
They have flexible and versatile pay-as-you-go plans – you won’t be locked in on a contract.	The set-up might still be “too complex” for some.
Their platform is easy-to-set-up that first-timers can do it on their own.	They have a trial period, which is a good thing – the bad thing is it’s available for just 3 days.
Site cloning is available as part of their features.	They don’t use cPanel as the backend – they have a custom backend system.
Their uptime or reliability is fantastic – it is > 99.99%	Emails and other features cost extra, whereas other hosting services offer it for free.
Tier-pricing is flexible and is ultimately reliable	There is no option for domain registration.
They have servers in 65+ locations in the world.
Add-ons are extremely affordable and can fully enhance your experience.

 

These are the comparisons of the advantages and drawbacks of Cloudways hosting. As you may have noticed, there are a few things they can improve on, but hey, the pros or advantages clearly outweigh them!

So, let’s now go and discover whether Cloudways hosting is a good service for you or not!

Cloudways Hosting Review: The Most Important Factors to Consider REVEALED

Choosing your next hosting service is crucial, especially if this is not your first website. There are a few different elements to consider in choosing your hosting service, and most of them aren’t just one-time things.

We’ve carefully looked at some of the most relevant factors, so that this Cloudways Hosting review will be everything you need!

Cloudways Hosting Speed & Performance

Let’s take off and start by checking out on Cloudways speed and overall performance. Ultimately, speed and performance would be two of the most important factors for hosting, right?

There are a few different ways on how to test the performance and speed of a hosting provider, but the best and most common would be by using speed test tools.

For this, we tried out a demo site with two of the slowest and most complex themes – Astra and Mesmerize.

We tested using Load Focus to check and assess how it would hold up and using WebPageTest to collect a series of performance and speed metrics about the site’s reliability.

The results? Well, it returned an extremely unimaginable speed of an average loading time of 0.68 seconds, a mean average response time of 498 ms with a 90% time of 525 ms.

All of this were from a one minute duration and it only had minimal errors – 6 to be exact.

If you are doubting the overall efficiency and speed of Cloudways hosting, we’re here to tell you that you shouldn’t. We tested virtually slow and sluggish themes and it returned results pretty quickly.

On their website, the company even allowed their customers to have several comparisons to other hosting platforms like Kinsta and WPEngine, and based on that, Cloudways had the biggest and the best results as they have no cap on monthly visits for their small-scale business plans.

Cloudways prides on the state-of-the-art features that they have, which we’ll talk about in the latter part of this review.

To summarize speed and performance, you can never go wrong with Cloudway hosting. It may not be the “fastest” when it comes to premium hosting, per se, but they are the best in their own respective hosting tier.

Pricing and Cost (Pay-As-You-Go)

One of the things that people love about Cloudways is the fact that it allows you to pay completely depending on how you want it. Whether you want to pay by the hour or monthly, it gives you the freedom to choose.

Their pricing starts off at $12 per month with a RAM of 1 GB, a single core, 1TB bandwidth, and a 25GB storage. The hourly rate is $0.0176 per hour.

You know what, we’re feeling good today so we’ll give you Cloudways’ monthly pricing for all servers so you can compare right here, right now!

Here’s the premium rate one from Digital Ocean.

But here’s the Digital Ocean standard set of pricing.

For AWS Data Centers, they just have single pricing. Here’s the table for your reference:

And lastly, GCE Data Centers or more commonly known and referred to as Google Cloud.

Take note that all plans come with the usual additives when you are getting hosting. If you wish to see thecomplete list of additional features, visit the pricing plans page on their website.

Hosting Plans Available

Cloudways hosting offers a huge selection of plans for their customers and clients. As a matter of fact, they’re actually one of the companies that have bigger and more flexible options for plans.

You can take a look at the images above to have a better of their plans, but, to give you an idea and as we mentioned above, they have monthly and hourly plans available. What does this mean?

Some of you might think that it’s not good pricing to begin with, when, in actuality, it would be like a pay-as-you-go system where you will only be paying for the amount of time that you used.

Personally, we tried this out.

We started off with the basic DO premium hourly rate that has a single core, provides 1GB RAM, 25GB storage, and a 1TB bandwidth. On the first day, we turned it on for 4 hours and had it turned off at 16 hours. It billed us $0.88, which was five hours because we killed it after the 4^th hour transpired, which could have billed the extra hour automatically.

Nevertheless, the hourly rate was real and it did not bill us more than what we were supposed to pay.

Reliability

If you haven’t noticed, most websites are sometimes experiencing downtime or are typically malfunctioning. It’s normal, since everything needs to be updated, but when it comes to hosting, the problem or the downtime should not and NEVER be because of the hosting service provider.

Website uptime or reliability is, in fact, one of the most essential aspects and factors of hosting. Based on the 4-hour experience we were telling you about when we tested the hourly rate, I never encountered any downtime, which was a green light.

But we weren’t convinced – we had to test it thoroughly. So, for it, I used an advanced monitoring tool to track the uptime of my Cloudways-hosted website.

So, the testing was simple – every 10 minutes, the tool emails me the status of the website if it’s live or active or if it’s uncontactable (or down) for longer than a minute. Downtimes were minimal as the maximum I received as four  seconds – nothing went on longer than a minute.

I tested this for 2 hours, and the maximum downtime was 21 seconds, this was a record compared to other cheap hosting plans I have used. I went on and reported this to the team and from there, we concurred that Cloudways hosting was reliable.

NOTE: This, in any way, does not mean that Cloudways gives the guarantee of uptime. These data just points out how reliable they are and how good their uptime is versus the usual downtime that is normal across all hosting services and domains.

Servers

One of the things people look at when choosing hosting services is the number of servers available. The more servers, the better the uptime of the service since there’s a lot of support and backup that are only purposely made for it.

Cloudways hosting is scattered all throughout the globe, having presence in 65+ different countries in 4+ continents.

With all these locations, you won’t be worried about using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to gain access to geographically-restricted locations from where you physically are!

Based on results, we were able to seamlessly connect to servers within North America as well as those in Europe. Asian servers were a bit slower, but they were nonetheless reliable.

Since Cloudways is designed to be pay-as-you-go, you’re really not going to be paying for something you wouldn’t use. Getting the monthly plan is just like keeping your monthly tab low because you are like pre-paying it.

Another key feature would be the account management capability. The service allows customers and clients to create various accounts for team members. On their website, they detail it – one account, multiple teams.

Data Center Hosting

While you might think of Cloudways’ complexity of services and features as something that’s able to offer data center hosting, they don’t. In case you didn’t know, data center hosting is a service given by a particular facility to help businesses in maintaining applications, servers, and other technical spots for clients.

Cloudways, as of the moment, only offers location hosting to clients that you can use to host several web apps and pages.

Customer Service or Customer Support

When it comes to customer support, you can’t get anything better than Cloudways. I mean honestly and personally, out of the many different hosting services I’ve ever tried, no other hosting service were more dedicated than Cloudway hosting.

Their claim to have 24/7, 365 customer support is real. If you’re not aware of what they say, they offer this type of support to give customers and clients “a guaranteed peace of mind.” Their support options are flexible – you can contact them via their LIVE chat support or your can request a call from Cloudways support.

The first time I tried it, they responded within 5 minutes – they gave me a call and had a ticket number to my concern. Second time was longer, it took like 15 minutes before someone got back to me – and within those 15 minutes I tried chat support, and someone responded within a minute.

This was an excellent investment coming from them, but the thing that was just not very convenient was the fact that the support team were only able to submit help tickets for customers who have full accounts. Those who are under the 3-day trial would need to upgrade their accounts.

Advanced Support

Apart from the commonality of support and assistance, Cloudways hosting also has a Premium or Advanced support feature. Primarily designed for businesses and agencies that are growing in number, Premium or Advanced support offers faster responses, as well as more skilled and higher-experienced specialists.

They’re available for both chat and live call requests, too.

I give their customer experience a 10/10, considering the fact that not many hosting services today even invest on customer service.

Safety and Security

I mean, who would be willing to take a risk and use a hosting service that has little security? Threats and risks are everywhere, especially in today’s time when hackers, viruses, and identity theft is prevalent. Luckily, Cloudways’ engineers anticipated this and so, they went on to program security measures that aren’t easily penetrated.

One thing to note is that Cloudways offers an SSL or a Secure Socket Layer certificate to its clients. No, it does not come with a cost – it’s for free!

An SSL is a type of technology used for securing and safeguarding a connection from malicious and sensitive attacks and threats. Websites secured with SSL are websites that can be trusted – so, it gives you this extra layer of security.

Ensure that all your assets are kept safe and secure!

E-Commerce Compatibility

We’ll be a bit technical here – Cloudways is using Apache, NGINX, and PHP 8.1 servers, which are servers used for applications that are for eCommerce, CMS platforms, as well as PHP-based applications.

Furthermore, the app library of Cloudways is also equipped with e-commerce tools, among the most common are Prestashop and Magento platforms.

That said, Cloudways hosting is an excellently eligible hosting platform for business owners or those who plan on setting up an online store or an online shop that would have items to sell.

Application Hosting

Other than e-commerce and similar or relative applications, Cloudways is also an advanced model that is able to host and support other applications. They have a total of 13 applications in total, some of which include osCommerce, Yii and Yii 2, CakePHP, X-Cart, and many more!

If I was a first-time website owner or webmaster, I would definitely be blinded by all these – but, is it really worth it?

Having all these available and eligible applications might not be perfect for everyone. But, if you are going to set up an online store or shop and you want almost everything to be automated and easily tracked, Cloudways will be the perfect platform for you.

Website Builder

What’s hosting without any website building capability? Most hosting platforms like Hostgator and Hostinger have their web-building interfaces and settings – and Cloudways isn’t a stranger to that.

It’s also compatible with WordPress, which is an automatic green light since most websites are run through it.

One thing we loved about website building using sites hosted in Cloudways is the fact that they allow customers and clients to monitor applications separately on a given server. What this simply means is, the monitoring level of the platform can be seen at application level, with two sections: Analytics and Logs.

Although Cloudways does not have their dedicated website builder, they have other options like WordPress to save the day.

That’s it for Cloudways – nothing more, nothing less. Oh wait, you’ll find a lot more that we might not have covered when you go through it yourself. We all have different tastes and settings, so, what’s good for us might not be good for you, and vice versa.

Nevertheless, through these factors, we can determine that Cloudways is a platform that you can fully trust and bank on if you are looking for an ultimately dependable and reliable hosting service.

Cloudways vs. BlueHost: Which One Is Better For You?

BlueHost has been one of Cloudways’ most recognized competitors simply because of how similar they are with each other. But, are they up to each other’s standards? Is Cloudways really close to BlueHost, and vice versa?

Here’s a quick table from Vlad Melnic, a Web Hosting Expert where he differentiated and compared the two based on the most important factors.

	BlueHost	Cloudways
Plans	Can be misleading at times and too complex to understand, but is affordable.	More straightforward and more affordable compared to BlueHost. The resources are listed exactly.
Rates and Prices	Affordable enough that even beginners would be able to afford it.	Affordable enough that even beginners would be able to afford it.
Customer Support	Has 24/7 LIVE chat support and offers phone support.	Has 24/7 LIVE chat support and offers “request a call” type of support.
Key Features	They offer free CDN, a money-back guarantee, but the bandwidths and spaces are unmetered and unlimited, which could be misleading.	Offers site migration, automatic backups, and exact resources that could be expended.
Speed and Performance	Only has one data center, which is in Utah.	Has multiple centers, 65+, in fact, in various countries.
Safety and Security	Guarantees a single layer of security.	Gives you two layers of security.

 

So that is how BlueHost compares to Cloudways, side-by-side. To be straightforward, Cloudways excels and is a lot better than BlueHost when it comes to several features. Even though BlueHost appears to be the more popular and more sought-after hosting service, it does not mean it’s better.

Cloudways Reviews Reddit

Reddit has been the source for content, comments, and other things with brutal honesty. It’s an avenue where techy, expert people come in and share their thoughts and opinions about one thing. For this, we’ll be discussing Cloudways as a hosting service!

Reddit user Ngantamsu posted and said that Cloudways is worth it and that it’s actually the best.

“Yes, I do think that it is worth it. Actually, I made the switch from SiteGround because of their extremely cheap rates. I also think their WordPress features are undermined, when, in fact, they are great.”

Another user, jsmile, said that it’s an extremely good-quality mid-level hosting service.

“Cloudways is a good mid-level-tier between working with a VPS and a fully-managed server. It makes it seem like hosting is easier as you are paying for tools that makes the experience easier, faster, and more comfortable.”

These are just some of the good words about Cloudways that people have been talking about. It’s always a good thing to see them!

Some people shared negative experiences, but it was not like Cloudways ripped them off – they just expected and anticipated better. But hey, for their pricing and overall rates, would you still complain?

FAQ

Conclusion

Cloudways is one of those cheap and affordable, but premium hosting services that you can bank on at times that you need it. Thanks to its relentless support and their never-ending development of their system, you’ll get the type of hosting you’ve always been searching for.

Hopefully, this Cloudways hosting review is enough for you to determine whether the service is the one for you or not!