CloudWays Review

Cloudways is a Managed WordPress web hosting service provider. If you are searching for a host that is economical but delivers high-performance too, then this Cloudways review will help you discern.

We have been reviewing web hosting companies for a while now, and we have noticed not many companies manage to balance affordability and functionality. However, Cloudways has managed to strike that balance. Cloudways claims to provide its customers with a fully managed and fast hosting solution without headaches at all.

Cloudways offers their customers a platform with multiple features and an infrastructure that is rock solid. All their features are optimized to the fullest to provide better security, speed and performance.

If you feel that your business will grow insanely large and need a host to support your server resources and the website, then Cloudways can be a good option. Read more and learn why.

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons;

Pros	Cons
They offer a fully managed hosting service	They don’t have a File Manager
They have super-fast servers	They do not include email hosting
They provide five different hosting plans	The domain has to be registered separately
They are very scalable	Most of the support is technical
The control panels are user-friendly
You get WordPress staging with a single click.
SSL certificate is offered for free
Customer support is available 24×7

About Cloudways

We are not going to skip over all the details of the Company, and this is no ordinary review. Cloudways was created by Uzair Gadit, Pere Hospital and Aaqib Gadit in 2009. The Company is based on the beautiful islands of Malta, Europe.

Over the years, we have watched Cloudways make a quantum jump from just a handful of staff today, and they have over 30 staff members and offices in Dubai and Spain. They have more than 8000 users and over 12000 servers that are located in more than 40 countries across the world. They have a dedicated team catering to WordPress website owners.

Cloudways is not only economical but also very functional. In terms of Managed WordPress (WP) hosting, they offer complete packages and solutions that are suitable to all budgets and needs.

Cloudways Managed WP Hosting

Sites created on the very famous WP Open-Source software, a website builder, Cloudways offers a cloud hosting service managed for such websites.

Cloudways stores all the websites on their cloud servers, permitting you to replicate various copies of your site content throughout any data centre you select.

They have an algorithm in place that manages the switching of all the data, and it also sends a copy of the website from a server that is available if ever your central server faces downtime. This entire system permits quick distribution of server resources, it offers extraordinary performance and one of the essential things, reliability.

Why Select Cloudways

Traditional hosting offers one server, and all your data has one backup. However, Cloudways doesn’t operate in a similar fashion. Cloudways stores your website in the cloud and on various servers. This leads to extraordinary performance and protection.

If ever you happen to have an unfortunate incident with your site, you will not have to sweat it at all. You know that on various servers, your site is stored, and not only that, you will also have multiple backups.

If you are looking at solid uptime, then I must add, Cloudways ensures that your uptime is reliable and consistent. The cloud network has various servers; this is particularly beneficial if your server faces a downtime, then any server from the network can manage your server. This means that you would probably never see downtime with Cloudways.

The load time is faster than most traditional hosts because their intelligent servers detect the location of the user and transmit the information using a server that is the closest to the user. They use SSD (Solid State Drive) that is top-notch, offering superior site security and performance.

In terms of security, Cloudways is a provider of cloud that offers better security than most traditional hosts because when they process WP sites, they use an extensive array of security techniques. Apart from this, many opt for Cloudways due to its scalability.

We have experienced cloud servers scale very fast; they are suitable for launches of large products, swiftly growing companies, and one-off campaigns as they have higher chances of experiencing a sudden increase in traffic.

Cloudways offers a straightforward pricing structure. Most hosts have various pricing structures like monthly, quarterly, bi-annual, annual and so on. Cloudways skips the whole thing. You pay for what you use, which means what resources you have used; they will bill you for that only. You don’t have to take a package that offers you services that you will never use.

Hosting Service

When we look at speed and reliability, dedicated and VPS servers are any day, a way better option to shared solutions. The market has plenty of hosts that offer dedicated and VPS servers; however, managed hosting is not as common.

What do we understand by this? In simple words, if you plan to go in for a dedicated solution with web hosts like AWS – Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud, or DigitalOcean, you will end up doing all the heavy work. You need to install your cPanel manually and create the hosting environment. The server’s daily operation and maintenance is also your responsibility.

This can get very stressful, especially knowing that you have to run your business too. This is just added work, and we don’t want that. Fortunately, this is not the case with Cloudways.

Cloudways is no ordinary hosting provider, and they offer fully managed service. This means that they take away all the extra work and manage it for you.

A good host must make your life easy, not add to your work, and Cloudways does just that. Along with making things easy for you, they also focus on delivering hosting features with high performance.

Key Features

Whatever your WP site requires, Cloudways will match up to it, be it SSL installation, https redirects, backups and even various tasks that could get tricky, especially for a newbie. However, all their servers are not alike. They have multiple server options that vary in terms of processing power, storage, memory, and bandwidth.

Regardless of the package you select, you will benefit from these great features.

Site Migration

Cloudways offer site migrations for free. So when you decide to opt for Cloudways, they will help you migrate the site from the current host to their own servers. The entire process is handled by an experienced team with no additional charges.

Servers with Super-Speed

Cloudways CDN offers better server speed. Every site looks forward to quick loading speed; however, this factor is highly vital for sites that host online stores. Every delayed second can mean the loss of a potential customer or a sale.

Auto-Healing

Cloudways is always on the top of their game. They not only take care of your site needs but also the additional needs that your server may have. They have an auto-healing feature that is unique. This feature effortlessly identifies and resolves all issues, reducing the possibility of your site crashing.

Dedicated Firewall

Being the world’s popular CMS comes with its challenges. WordPress is constantly being watched by hackers. They look for various ways to get through them. Luckily for us, Cloudways consistently fights attacks on the servers and shields their customers’ WP sites using a dedicated firewall.

SSL Certificate

Cloudways has an in-built SSL feature, Let’s Encrypt; with this, you can attach a free SSL encryption to the site, creating a connection that’s secure for your website customers and visitors.

Two-Factor Authentication

Along with the SSL encryption and the dedicated firewall, they also have a two-factor authentication in place that offers added security against spiteful hackers.

Plugin Installations and Single-Click App

I find it totally frustrating to jump through hoops, wasting 15 minutes just to install a WordPress plugin or app. With Cloudways plugin installs and a single-click app, you can save up on a lot of time. I stress more, it is a simple, single click of the button, and your WP app is installed on your server.

Cloning and Staging

Cloning your site is nothing but making various copies of the site and keeping them handy to use as backups for your site, showcasing your website to potential and current clients, and switching servers.

Cloudways staging is used to test the changes you have made to your website, and you want to make sure it is exactly what you wanted, make sure it looks good and works properly before making the tweaks live and getting them out for your customers.

Advanced Caching

The cloud infra that Cloudways uses is from 5 cloud providers; Google Cloud, Linode, Vultr, AWS, and Digital Ocean; they all provide VPS services and dedicated servers to ensure the performance is lightning-fast.

In addition, Cloudways uses various caching mechanisms to ensure the server optimization is maximum. One of them is called “Breeze,” which is their own caching plugin.

Breeze supports their own CDN. You can also use Redis and Varnish that are famous caching plugins. Cloudways always recommends using any one of them, never both.

Vertical Scaling

Vertical Scaling is used when you notice a steady rise in traffic and the server needs an immediate upgrade. Vertical Scaling is created for solely this reason. You will find it under the tab that reads Server Management. With the help of Vertical Scaling, you can decrease or even increase the hosting plans and server resources with a couple of clicks.

24×7 support

I’m sure you have probably read a couple of reviews on Cloudways and know by now they offer good customer service. If you need any sort of assistance, you can reach out to them via live chat, email, community forum, call back, knowledge base and check their blogs.

We were delighted with the live chat service. We tried chatting with them at various times, and the response always came in very quickly.

They have a support bot that tries to understand your concern and solve it; if it is unable to solve the issue, you will be connected to an agent. This entire process doesn’t take long. I have always got an agent that was prompt, knowledgeable and very helpful. The support team has been successful in solving their clients’ issues 99% of the time. That’s a food figure.

Launching your site

In one word – Easy! Cloudways makes it very easy for you to configure and launch your server, especially with their intuitive control panel.

Select Your Provider

Before you begin to configure your server, notice the control panel has various options of cloud providers, you need to select a suitable provider. If you’re new to this, let me explain; a cloud provider is a hosting company that offers server infrastructure for managed hosts like Cloudways. So in terms of service, they offer Infrastructure.

The various companies that Cloudways works with;

• Google Compute Engine
• Linode
• Vultr
• Amazon Web Services
• Digital Ocean

The setup is straightforward. We selected the WordPress app, and then it asked us to select a cloud host to our preference. We went in for DigitalOcean because my website server didn’t need a lot of server power.

Once you select the cloud provider, you will be able to begin configuration of the server with the help of the slider that you will find in the cPanel, use it to choose the number of page views you anticipate in a month. Cloudways will suggest a server that has the amount of resources your site will need.

If you’re an experienced user, you can manually change the server specifications to match your requirements. All you need to do is choose the number of the core processor, how much storage, bandwidth and RAM you require.

As your checking out the various server configurations, Cloudways will show you the price of every option, which gives you the exact amount you will need to pay. After you are done with these steps, you will need to select the server location. You are ready to install WP.

Installing WordPress

Post configuration of the cloud server, you will be able to install WordPress. Go to the tab Application Management and choose any one of the below apps;

• Standard WordPress
• WordPress Multi-site
• WordPress WooCommerce

No matter what you select, you will gain from the preinstalled and configured plugin W3 Total Cache for maximum site performance and speed.

Using Control Panel

The control panel that Cloudways has, offers settings and features that are ready to be tweaked is found under the tab Server Management.

Security

Additionally, to the secure environment and dedicated firewall of Cloudways, they offer security features that permit you to have IP addresses – “White List” to access the server.

Monitoring

We are very impressed by this feature that Cloudways offers. In this category, you can, with much ease, observe a graph that will assist you in monitoring the resources of your server. It enables you to monitor fifteen variables like; idle CPU, per second reads, incoming traffic, disk space etc.

Backups

Setup daily auto backups or even two days, three days right up to a week. If you like, you can always backup your sites manually whenever you wish to. It can be done by simply clicking a button.

Crash Protection

One of the worst situations you can find yourself in is, paying for an advertisement, then getting massive traffic, which leads to your site crashing only because it was not well equipped to handle the enormous number of visitors.

Cloudways has the feature “Vertical Scaling” that enables you to adjust the resources of your cloud server according to the requirement. This can be done with a few clicks. This is brilliant! The cherry on top of it all is, you only need to pay for what you have used.

Handy Tools

Cloudways provides their customers with various handy tools like; Managed Service – These tools can be used for the configuration of Apache, Cache memory, MySQL and more. You will also find a section, Application Add-On, which is used for installing apps add-ons for management of emails, DNS management, and more.

They also have another tool known as WordPress Migrator and some other extra tools used to restore backups, integrate Git, install SSL certificate for free and perform valuable functions.

E-commerce

My review would not be complete without discussing e-commerce. Cloudways provides all their customers with features that have a broad spectrum of e-commerce that is created to make online selling as straightforward as possible.

At the moment, they hosted over 10,000 online stores, and you can expect 100% reliability and super-fast loading speeds with WordPress. These are the essential factors for an online store owner.

Supported Platforms

As we speak, Cloudways supports multiple famous e-commerce platforms that included, WooCommerce, Prestashop and Magento.

WooCommerce

They are one of the most famous e-commerce platforms. With single-click installation, Cloudways has made WooCommerce installation very straightforward. The e-commerce hosting package has site migration for free, WP-CLI support, Single-click server scalability, and various other tools that are helpful for e-commerce and WooCommerce.

Magento

It is the same as WooCommerce, and you can install Magento with a single click, which helps you streamline the entire process. Magento stores are super-fast due to the various unique features like built-in SSH, different SSL deployment and more. They give you higher conversions and seamless performance.

Cloudways Uptime

Cloudways has partnered up with a few of the best providers of cloud servers, and this allows them to offer a fantastic uptime of more than 99%. Just as we expect it to be, the site will be most of the time ready and online for your customers to view.

Cloudways Load Times

Load time is vital for start-ups and also for small businesses because if the loading time is low, it has a negative effect on Google’s SEO rankings. And that’s not all, slow speeds can drive your customers away.

In today’s day and age, when everything is moving so fast, people don’t have the time to wait for your page to load; they are going to leave and most probably never return.

We have good news for all WordPress website owners that are hosting with Cloudways, your sites will be 50% faster than websites that are hosted with standard hosts. All thanks to Cloudways for using the latest technology, VMAN, that was specifically developed to optimize one thing, and that’s speed!

This technology uses;

• Nginx
• Apache
• Memcached
• Varnish

And as if this isn’t enough, it also uses:

• PHP-FPM
• Redis
• MySQL

I must say, Cloudways hosting is high-speed.

Global Data Centres

If you are using the Stackpath CDN, you will benefit from their global network datacentres nodes. These nodes store copies of the website, auto-detect the geographic location of your customer and swiftly display your website from the node closest to them.

Using Cloudflare

You can most certainly use Cloudflare CDN; you will get detailed instructions from Cloudflare, explaining the process of how you can link to the global network of Cloudflare that has more than 150 data centres.

Website Changes for Speed

No matter what type or the size your website is, there are always various ways to increase the performance and page loading speed.

If you are unsure of where to begin, take a peek at the insight tools found in Google’s Page Speeds. It analyses the speed of your site pages and gives you specific suggestions to make them more responsive and faster.

Is the Company safe?

Cloudways always gloats about the provider’s security, and they have an excellent reason. We have noticed Cloudways takes the security of their servers very seriously. As we discussed earlier, all the servers are guarded with dedicated firewalls.

They have a team of technical experts that use a particular technique to harden security. It is an additional measure to make sure hackers are kept at bay, keeping the Cloudways servers safe. With auto backups of your site, we can safely say your website is very secure at Cloudways.

App-Level Security

The security of your applications is also taken very seriously. They have added a layer of security to prevent any external threats that your website could face through the applications.

Customer Support

I wouldn’t term them as the best in the industry; however, they have managed to handpick a support team that is very knowledgeable. Their team is available 24×7, 365 days. We believe that a company will always have loyal customers if they have a sound support system.

Honestly, there is no use of the top-level service if there is no one to help me run it. Cloudways has made it very convenient for their customers to reach them through various ways; Phone, email and live chat.

They also have a rich knowledge base that will help their customers with general information about the service, and the FAQ section is also an excellent place to get more info, and finally, their social media page.

Cloudways Pricing and Plans

You are probably reading this article with a fixed budget unless your online business is earning millions in a month. We have good news for those of you on a tight budget, Cloudways provides multiple flexible plans. Their Five different partners (Google Cloud, Linode, Vultr, Amazon Web Service and Digital Ocean) have other plans.

If you are a beginner, then the starter plans for Linode and Digital Ocean will suffice. But if your website is getting high volume traffic, then Amazon Web Service or Google Cloud will be an excellent option to go with.

Starting Monthly Price $10

No matter which plans you choose, the pay-as-you-go structure gets very convenient. It is difficult to not like it. You don’t need to get sucked into expensive plans that have features that you may never use. With this, you only pay for what you use.

Down the line you think you need to upgrade, the feature – Vertical Scaling from Cloudways will do that for you, and the service will become both flexible and affordable.

You can make your payments using PayPal or a credit card. Actually, not many web hosts accept payments via PayPal, So for us, this is definitely a pro. If you are still hesitant, let me tell you they have a free trial period of three days. So before you make any payment, you can actually try their features and servers.

Avoid Directly Approaching Cloud Provider

You may wonder why so, Cloudways uses them; why can’t you?

I agree; you may even get it cheaper with them, like if you go directly to; Google Cloud, Linode, Vultr, Amazon Web Service, or even Digital Ocean; however, you will have to do everything on your own.

Cloudways Managed service has your back, and you don’t need to worry yourself about the complex tasks; they take care of it. You just need to get ready to receive traffic as soon as possible.

Conclusion

We 100% recommend Cloudways as we are in love with everything. We know of many who have approached their partners directly and even got the service at a discount, but they had to get everything done on their own. Unless you have the time and resources to set it up by yourself, we suggest the Managed Service from Cloudways. You can also check our Kinsta review.

With a bit of premium, all the hassle of setting things up is taken away with their expert support and control panel that is streamlined. Someone else will be doing all the heavy lifting, and you can simply continue doing what you do best – Run the show!

Cloudways is totally scalable and has impressive features designed to assist your site every step of the way. If you wish to start a WordPress site, or probably already have one, and you want to have minimal headaches and maximum performance, I say, Cloudways is totally worth it!